The Silverlight vs. Flash SmackDown was a smashing success!

Thanks to everyone that made it out to the Silverlight vs. Flash SmackDown event yesterday in Winnipeg.  It was a lot of fun to present the content on the Silverlight side, and have some friendly banter back and fourth with Darren Osadchuks who presented Flash.

We had nearly 200 people in attendance and completely jam packed the Carol Shields Auditorium at the Millennium Library.  In fact we had to get an “overflow” room setup last minute that we streamed the event to via the new web site: TechSmackDown.com. TechSmackDown will have all the event video footage and PowerPoint’s posted shortly.

Everyone was glued to their seats for the entire 2 and a half hour event.  In fact when asked if anyone wanted to take a break, nobody raised their hands.  A ton of prizes were given out thanks to our sponsors: Anvil Digital, Protegra, Microsoft, redgate, Apress, O’Reilly, Wrox, and CDot Networks.  The event was the first event put on by all three tech user groups in the city: Winnipeg.net User Group, Flash in the Peg, and New Media Manitoba.

If you can’t wait to play with some of the technologies that were shown last night, make sure to check out: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/ You can download trial versions of Expression Studio Tools, or even try out Expression Blend 3 Preview!

So for those that want to check out the demo’s for themselves, lets do a quick run through right now.

Sketchflow Rocks The House

I think Sketchflow is probably the single most innovative technology to come out of Microsoft in the last decade.  I know it sounds crazy but its just true!  After all the innovation we had done in software, 70% of all IT projects still fail!  Sketchflow is going to change that!  I started by showing how to draw with wiggly styles in Sketchflow and present the client with options.  We then moved into creating documentation from our sketches like magic!  I’m pretty sure I saw tears of happiness in most people’s eyes, followed by some crazy applause!

We then moved on to actually creating an awesome application by importing a PhotoShop file, and then making an application in Silverlight using blend that followed all the styles that were created in PhotoShop! Many thanks to Jon Harris for getting me ready to rock for this demo.

Silverligh Dominates Video

I showed how the YouTube experience of watching Big Buck Bunny was pretty bad, as was Vimeo.  I then loaded up Expression Media Encoder and showed off all the amazing features it had and produced a pretty cool video.  I then showed the new Big Buck Bunny video with Adaptive Streaming with Silverlight. People couldn’t believe the quality and the features it had.  Skipping, rewinding, amazing quality of video… running on a Mac!  On Internet at a Library!

Some other great Silverlight Examples

In closing I tried to show off some of the great implementations out there that take advantage of Silverlight! Here are some of them:

• Hard Rock Memorabilia
• Microsoft Health Patient Journey
• Nasa International Space Station
• CNN – Obama – The Moment
• WorldWide Telescope
• Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control

The message was clear, designers and developers need to find a way to work together better!  Silverlight and the Expression tools offers something unique to the equation with Sketchflow, which will launch in Expression Studio 3.

Fun was had by all!  Check out the massive crowd!  And this is just one room, the other overflow room had another 30 or so people watching across the hall on a live stream!

Darren did an awesome job explaining the entire Adobe Flash Platform.  As a .net guy, I must admit it was pretty impressive as well.

Here’s a wide angle shot of the crowd!  Our goal was to get designer and developers in the same room and really pump them up about building awesome web applications!  Silverlight vs. Flash was the title of the event, but at the end of the day, I think it was really clear that everyone is going to win in the Microsoft vs. Flash Battle of the Titans.

As a reminder to everyone that was at the event, the slides and video of the event will be posted very shortly at TechSmackDown.com.