I finally attended a GCPCUG web development SIG and was very glad I did. Brian Gorbett is a recent addition to MS’s developer evangelist team and his presentation convinced me to add Silverlight to my “technologies to check out” list. Apparently MS is planning on using the 2008 Olympics to push version 2.0 into prime time. One gee wiz thing he showed was called “deep zoom” that allows you to embed one large graphic inside another and then zoom in several levels deep - fractal style. Not really something you would do everywhere but it could have some interesting possibilities. For example you might want to do a Google Earth type thing and scale details of a map.

He also mentioned that the upcoming IE 8 has been made to be more standards compliant and will reportedly break 40% of the existing sites. Fortunately they have a compatibility mode that reverts it back to a version 7 rendering engine. He convinced me to run right home and download it since I’m in the middle of a complete conversion of my web site and want to make sure it's legit HTML-wise. So I did. Big mistake. Apparently it is not yet compatible with VS 2008 new menu control which is now front and center inside my site. I should really know better that to try something in beta on my development machine. Can you say “Virtual Machine?”

If you are just dying to see Silverlight in action you can check out MIX or Memoribilia portion of the Hard Rock site.