Today will be the first meeting of the Chicago Designers & Developers User Group. I have the honor of speaking at the first meeting on Silverlight 2's control model. My goal of this presentation is to give the group a primer to user controls, custom controls, templating, and most importantly showcase the new visual state manager. I wanted to provide everyone with a large set of resources for the topics discussed.

1. I think anyone who follows the bleeding edge of siverlight would agree, the best resource for detail explanations of custom controls and the parts/states models would be from one of the Project Managers to Silverlight, Karen Corby. She has a four part series to discuss the matter in extra detail. Check it at at:

• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/11/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-1-of/
• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/18/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-2-of-4/
• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/23/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-3-of-4/
• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/25/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-4-of-4/

2. The next best source would be a recent visitor to Chicago, Tim Heuer who co-presented with Corrina Barber. Tim's blog has a great article showcasing the Visual State Manager at http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/06/04/silverlight-introduces-visual-state-manager-vsm.aspx.

3. Silverlight's own website has multiple video sources that show how to do different things in silverlight including a growing controls section... always keep the silverlight.net site in your favorites, check it out at http://silverlight.net/Learn/videocat.aspx?cat=2

4. Adam Kinney, a technical evangelist for Microsoft based out of the campus in Redmond. Adam has promoted, along with many others two new silverlight control contests. Learn more about them at http://adamkinney.com/blog/344/default.aspx

See you at CD2!