I usually blog on whatever it is I have been interested in at that specific moment or whatever it is I have been playing with. For the most part I have spent my time varied on 2 separate non-related fields both interesting in their own way but nothing I wanted to blog about until I got far enough along. That said, instead of leaving my blog empty and waiting I would give a little insight to those things.

The first was I wanted to create a fun game in silverlight 2, specifically I targeted Desktop Tower Defense because I enjoyed the concepts of the game from Warcraft 3 and I had ideas to kind of take it to my own creative avenue. Nothing really interesting to note in the idea, but what was interesting was developing the logic and the AI. I decided to go down the road of using the path finding algorithm A* for how I would get the mob from one side of the map to the other side of the map in the most efficient way possible. What was interesting about that was the reality of the situation. I took a c# example built for a windows form and used it directly in silverlight... no modifications were needed except the final draw path which was simple. I made a few test cases and as I get farther along I will blog about them and share my experiences. I just found it cool that I did not have to recreate the idea from the ground up from the developers perspective and it goes to show how much of the base .net framework is available in silverlight. Lastly I would comment that I was impressed with the overall speed of things.

The second thing I have been working on has been in preparation for the CD2 meeting on Wednesday. For the most part I have decided to cover the Visual State Manager and describe the Silverlight control model... specifically what is a Custom Control vs a User Control and what that means to the designer/developer. After that I would unveil and demo the VSM in action to the state and parts model. Now the VSM is very powerful, but my first impressions of playing with it were difficult in some cases. I had the idea of what I wanted, I understood how I wanted the different states to act but the overall problem I ran into with VSM was that it appears that the State groups are not managed Hierarchical which I found very frustrating from a designer's perspective. So there are some caveats to using VSM, but I will say the tool still has some power to it and it should fit alot of common cases. This is not a deep dive discussion on Wednesday, only a primer to whats new to Silverlight 2 Beta 2 but I will definately attempt to cover how to really make these models and conepts work for you at a later time.

I will add the real meat of my presentation and a slew of sources just before my presentation on Wednesday, so check back soon. I hope to see you at CD2UG, if you dont know what I am talking about and your in the Chicago area, check out http://www.cd2ug.org. See you there.