Question

I’m a .net developer with 5 years of experience building asp.net, wcf etc. I would like to learn Silverlight.

I’m sure many of you have gone through learning curve of Silverlight. Could anyone please help me with following queries:

1. How long it would take to learn Silverlight for experience .net Developer?
2. How long it would take to apply MVVM design pattern etc after mastering the basics of Silverlight?
3. How long it would take to build silverlight projects with TDD pattern given 1 and 2 above are done.

Any good links and books will be appreciated. I’ve been looking through these ones already:

1. http://www.silverlight.net/learn/
2. http://channel9.msdn.com/Tags/silverlight

Answer 1

1) Depends. XAML is not difficult to learn, but it can be a complex beast–especially when you thrown in binding and visual state, etc.

2) Depends. you can learn it and roll your own, you can use a framework. the flavors are many and varied, but the concepts are not too difficult, at least in theory.

3) Depends. are you agile or waterfall? do you have a designer on your team? how well is the model implemented? are you using a pre-packaged test framework or rolling your own? (etc.)

you should probably look into getting a book or 3, as least for reference.