New Book Idea – Migrating from Flex to Silverlight

My friend Victor Gaudioso, the author of the WPF and Silverlight book I edited earlier this year (read the post here), has been trying to convince me to co-author a new book with him for months. Well, he came up with a proposal that got me so excited I finally took the bait. Here’s the pitch: how to switch from Flex to Silverlight 2.0. The concept is aimed squarely at Flex developers and object-oriented Flash developers, teaching them how to achieve similar results in Silverlight 2.0 websites and applications using Blend 2.5 and Visual Studio 2008.

In contrast with our last book, the idea of this one is developer-centric, not really developer/designer-centric. Also, in contrast with our last book, which focused mainly on WPF, this book would be focused entirely on Silverlight 2.0 as a parallel to Flex. Finally, this book would be structured more like a university syllabus – a series of tutorials that build toward a final project: a complete Rich Media Application, unlike the last book in which each chapter was a self-contained lesson on a particular topic.

Here’s our proposed table of contents:

— Part I – Welcome to Silverlight 2.0 —
Introduction
- What is Silverlight 2.0?
- What is Expression Blend 2.5?
- What is Visual Studio 2008?
- How do Blend and Visual Studio work together?
Who this book is for
- Flex developers that use Actionscript 3.0 and MXML
- Flash developers that use Object-Oriented Actionscript 2.0
- What This Book Covers
- What This Book Does Not Cover
What’s the difference?
- Flash vs. Silverlight 2.0
- Flex vs. Silverlight 2.0
— Part II – Getting Started with Silverlight 2.0 —
Your First Silverlight 2.0 Project: “Hello World, Goodbye Flash”
The Blend 2.5 IDE
The Visual Studio 2008 IDE
— Part III – Creating a Complete Web Application —
Controls – Creating Interactivity
- Button
- Hyperlink
- CheckBox and RadioButton
- TextBlock and Text Box
- Slider
- DataGrid
- ProgressBar
- Creating Your Own Custom Controls
- – Skinning Controls
- – Creating Control Art From Scratch
Panels – Laying Out Your Content
- Grid
- StackPanel
- Canvas
- ListBox
- TabControl
- ScrollViewer
- Creating Your Own Custom Panels
Resource Dictionaries and Reusable Styles
States and Navigation
Storyboards, Transitions and Animation
Incorporating Media
- Image and MultiScaleImageElement
- MediaElement
- – Incorporating Sound
- – Incorporating Video
Drag and Drop
Events
Binding
- Understanding Binding
- Creating a CLR Object
- Binding to a CLR Object in Blend 2.5’s Design View
- DataBinding, RSS and Web Services
- PropertyChanged Events
HTML DOM Integration
- The Browser Back Button and Silverlight 2.0
- Deep-Linking
Preloading
Windows and Popups
- ModalWindow
- Popup
- FileOpenDialog
Summary

We pitched the concept to Friends of Ed, who published our last book who sent back a lukewarm response for understandable reasons:

1. The concept is too similar to the last book, which was, in effect, targeted at Flash designers and developers.
2. The Silverlight platform is changing so rapidly they’re worried about the title being out-of-date by the time it’s published.
3. They feel that the Flash/Flex community still doesn’t respect Silverlight and therefore the market for this title is too small.

So my question, dear reader, is this: do you think there may be a market for this title? Would you buy it? I’m interested in your opinions to determine whether I should press the matter with Friends of Ed (or see if O’Reilly would be interested).

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