Free Silverlight 1.0 Training

A few months back, Mike Harsh, Program Manager of the Silverlight Team at Microsoft, recorded a series of training for Silverlight 1.0 at Lynda.com, which is available for free on Lynda.com. I love Lynda training videos and a free one definitely deserves more love.

I find these tutorials much more suited for those starting from scratch in learning Silverlight, compared to the “How do I?” videos in silverlight.net, as the chapters are structured to teach you the A-Zs of Silverlight (the basics at least), and hopefully, Zero to Hero!

If you’re new to Silverlight and curious of its capabilities and how to get started, check out the videos, their well worth it

Personalized Pages

I’m a big fan of Personalized Pages, which I use to subscribe to feeds from all around the Web, and view them in one single Web page, which is a pretty convenient way to allow me to keep myself updated with recent news.

But when using Firefox 3.0, the Personalized Page service I was currently using, Windows Live Personalized Experience, wouldn’t work nicely. Some of the feeds couldn’t be loaded and I am no longer able to navigate to the various tabs I have.

Thus, I went and tested out the various Personalized Page services like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes and Pageflakes, to decide which service to migrate to, and these are my thoughts.

iGoogle

Pros:

• Google Reader as RSS reader
• Loads of widgets available
• Able to view feeds contents directly by clicking the + beside the listed titles
• Close integration with other Google services (Gmail, etc)

Cons:

• Ugly GUI
• Unable to customize layout (Fixed number of columns)
• lack of beautiful theme choices
• Search bar taking up loads of screen space, (I can Google stuff with my Web browser)
• adding stuff is troublesome
• No OPML import or export (containing all my feeds)
• Unable to drag and rearrange order of tabs.