The last week and a half, I have together with a handful of people at Intergen, built a new Silverlight site for Microsoft. I call it a Silverlight site instead of a Silverlight application, since it is actually an entire site. We created the whole experience inside Silverlight instead of having Silverlight “islands” on AJAX/HTML page. The project has been intense and fun. It is kind of interesting to see how much you can get done in such a short timeframe.
On Thursday the 2nd we had more or less nothing but a few line drawings from our design guy Dave. At the end of Friday, we had a skeleton, that is a more or less fully functional site without any layout. ListBoxes on a white page just showing that the data was coming from over the wire from our WPF services.
A week later (next Friday meeting) the site was more or less complete and was shown internally. A few bugs where fixed during the day yesterday (Monday 13th). And the site was shown to the world during WPC early this morning. A few more tiny things were sorted today. So all in all, the site came up incredibly fast. Unfortunately we couldn’t use SL3, even though it was released before the site. But Microsoft wanted the site available to as many as possible (just look at all the links to social networks).
The site also supports mobile browsers in the form of iPhone and WinMo. That part of the site is however regular HTML. But still looks good and should be tested if a mobile browser is available.
The project will probably be dissected by the involved people, and turned in to a bunch of blog posts. At least from my point. I know that Chris Auld, one of the driving forces behind this job, has talked about rolling back the TFS and grabbing some screen shots along the wayto show how extremely fast everything came together. There are not that many cool functional things in there, but there are still a few things worth blogging about. Such as the smooth streaming and scrolling that I wrote about in previous posts.
I really hope that you try playing with it a little. Unfortunately, there are only 3 videos in there right now. But Microsoft has promised to add a couple of new movies every week or so. So the site will slowly fill up with more videos. And if you find anything wrong with it, or generally just want to give some good or bad feedback, don’t hesitate to add a comment!
Here is the link: http://www.office2010themovie.com/
And yeah…I just want to mention that the streaming is unfortunately not perfect if you are located in a remote place like New Zealand.
You also HAVE to check out this video! It is totally awesome. Funny, but still impressive. Microsoft must have spent some dough making it!