(Full disclosure: I was given a free copy of the eBook for review. However, I had already purchased the MEAP (Manning Early Access Preview) and pre-ordered the print edition of the book earlier this year.)

In short, I absolutely recommend this book. It makes a great introduction to Silverlight and the ultimate reference for experienced developers, all in one book.

I will spare you a rehashing of the table of contents, but the content of book really flows nicely from introductory material to some more advanced topics. There aren’t many parts of the book I would consider optional for serious Silverlight developers. Sometimes when I am reading a tech book, I will feel compelled to skip a section or even an entire chapter because I don’t feel it is relevant to my own practices. Here I think I skimmed a few pages in Chapter 19 – Printing, but that is about it.

If you are a Silverlight developer, looking to move into that space or even have a casual interest in the technology, you will find Silverlight 4 in Action an indispensable guide.

Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown

Remember there is still a second contest that does not end until next Friday. Check out the original post for all the information. The competition is still wide open!

Best of luck and congratulations to Marc!!!

This hopefully goes without saying (Yes, I am saying it), but these licenses are not for resale. They have unique, traceable keys. Please enter the contests only if you really need the software and plan to give back to the community in some way as a result of winning.

Here are some things not included in these licenses, which would be available with a paid MSDN Ultimate subscription: MSDN Magazine, support calls, Office 2010 licenses.

Update: Office 2010 licenses are included for development and test purposes only.

Contest number one is simple. Send me an email at alashcraft [at] gmail [dot] com and explain (honestly) why you need the subscription and what you plan to do with the tools. Keep in mind that this is all about community. I will choose the winner based on need and community influence. I must receive your entry by Friday, July 9 at 8:00am EDT (UTC – 4) and will announce the winner at 12pm that same day.

For the second contest, I want to make things a little more challenging. Email me a .NET-related technical article to be published on alvinashcraft.com as a guest post. The content must be original, written by the submitter, and not available on any other web sites or blogs. Please include a short bio for yourself as well. All must should be emailed to alashcraft [at] gmail [dot] com, and they must be received no later than Friday, July 16 at 8:00am EDT (UTC – 4). I will select the winner that weekend and announce the winner on Monday, July 19th. If I receive an overwhelming number of great articles, I may dig up some smaller prizes for 2nd and 3rd place (probably books). The winning post will be published the week of the 19th.

I will do my best to scan my spam folder for entries, but please try not to mention Viagra, cheap meds, free Photoshop software or foreign bank accounts in your emails to me.

Any attempts to shamelessly promote my blog or Twitter account will have no effect on the outcome of the contests but are welcome nonetheless. 

If you have any questions, leave a comment, email me, or send me a reply on Twitter.

I will eventually get this posted to Studio Styles. Until then, here is a dark theme for Visual Studio that I created. The green and orange give it a Halo-ish feel. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Downloads

HaloVibe theme for VS2008

HaloVibe theme for VS2010

Monday:

• Arrive at SEATAC – 2:30pm
• Party with Palermo – 7pm-10pm

Tuesday:

• MVP Summit TweetUP / First Time MVPs Meetup – 7:30pm-9:30pm
• Insiders Party by Infragistics – 8pm-10pm
• Hoping to check out later: 1st Annual Tellago MVP Party – 8pm-12am

Wednesday:

• Solutions Architect: Product Group Evening Event – 6pm-8pm
• MVP Summit 2010 Edition @ Chez Neward – 6pm-10pm

Thursday:

• Attendee Party – 7pm-11:30pm

Friday:

• Need to be home for family commitment. Shuttle to SEATAC pickup at 10:40am.

Send me a DM on Twitter or email me if you would like my mobile number to call or text me next week.

The Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) just hit my MSDN Subscriber Downloads RSS feed. Go forth and download!

MSDN

Wow! I hope that email in my inbox is not some kind of elaborate April Fool’s Day hoax. 

It’s an amazing honor to receive this award. I would like to thank Dani, Lindsay, my new MVP Lead Miha Kralj, and everyone who considers my blog a valuable resource. I will do my best to live up to the MVP status by becoming more involved in the .NET community. To start, I will be doing a talk on S#arp Architecture at Philly.NET Code Camp 2009.1 on April 18th. Be sure to come on out if you can! There is a great lineup of speakers and sessions.

I hope to see many of you at the next MVP Summit!

The MSDN Developer Conference series has been making its way around the country over the last several weeks. The conference takes the best of PDC08 and boils it down to a one day event at a reasonable price – $99. On Friday, Washington, DC area developers got their opportunity to experience the event in Reston, VA. Since there is no Philadelphia event, I decided to drive south to Reston rather than north to New York City.

There was a Developer Dinner the evening before the conference featuring a Silverlight line-of-business presentation by Marc Schweigert and Pete Brown. Marc showed some tricks for data retrieval with the current feature set available in Silverlight, and then Pete took over and showed how future improvements in Silverlight are going to streamline the code necessary to perform data access. Pete and Marc did a great job, and the pizza wasn’t bad either. 

I was really looking forward to the conference, and I must say it did not disappoint. My biggest problem was deciding which sessions to sit in on. There were interesting topics and engaging speakers throughout the day. Ultimately, I decided on a language futures session with Kevin Hazzard, a Windows Azure session with G. Andrew Duthie, a VSTS 2010 session with Steve Andrews and an ASP.NET 4.0 session with Rachel Appel.

After lunch, I sat down and chatted with Kevin Hazzard about how he approached his talk, which was a meld of three PDC sessions on the .NET languages. I agree with his observation that when watching Anders Hejlsberg’s session on The Future of C#, you could feel his passion for the language. Kevin wanted to harness that energy in his talk, and I think he did a very good job of it. I also learned that he is working on a book about scripting languages & .NET due out later this year. Stay tuned for more details…

I was able to finally meet some other bloggers & tweeters like Jeff Fritz, Justin Etheredge and Christopher Steen. It’s nice to associate an actual face with the tiny icons in the interwebs.

I want to give special thanks to Lindsay Rutter, Dani Diaz, G. Andrew Duthie, Pete Brown, Kevin Hazzard, Bob Familiar, Rob Keiser, John McClelland (founder of Partner Huddle on Facebook), and many others for all their efforts. They all had their hands full with this event and also took some time during the day to chat with me a bit. I had a great time on Friday and picked up a few tips and tricks along the way.

My Xbox 360 NXE Avatar:

I didn’t see a ‘Soul Patch’ in the facial hair section… gotta log an enhancement request on MS Connect.