EFAS was an invitation only event which was attended by 37 or so web professionals from across the country. The presenters/mentors were Nigel Parker, Tim Heuer and Arturo Toledo. The goal was simple: to learn and innovate with Silverlight through a hands on experience. This meant that while there were presentations the majority of the time was spent actually USING Silverlight as opposed to HEARING about it. In the end I believe this made a huge difference to everyone who attended.

The first day was spent in introductions, setting up computers (for those that didn’t have all the tools installed – sorry!!) and writing a “Hello, World!” app in Silverlight. A nice touch was that Nigel had organised Windows 2008 R2 Beta servers – 1 for each team – to make development and showing off at the end easier. The day finished off with a game of Werewolves (with Dora the Explorer cards no less).

The second day we really got into some serious hands on stuff. The first activity was designing a mobile phone for a kiwi bird. There were some really great ideas from all teams like sending smells as a way for kiwis to communicate, which I really liked. Next activity we designed a calculator as a way to practice DependencyProperties in Silverlight and for the rest of the day we worked on our projects. The last 2 days people worked on their projects, interspersed with short presentations from Nigel, Arturo and Tim.

On the last night, while sitting in a pub my team decided to stop working on the booking app seeing as it was simply too complex to finish in time and decided to implement our design of the kiwi mobile phone. In the end I think that was a good decision, since this gave us a lot broader coverage of Silverlight capabilities from both a designer and developer perspective. We did run into a few hitches (all of which had workarounds), which I will blog about separately once I’m back from my holiday.

All in all I think it was a very sucessfull week. Everyone learned a lot and the mentoring from Tim and Arturo helped heaps. If I could improve anything, it would be to make it a day longer just so that there is a proper wind down. I’m really looking forward to working with Silverlight more.