Sample Silverlight 4 projects - silverlight

I am looking to get my hands wet with Silverlight 4. I was wondering if someone can recommend a sample silverlight 4 project that I can do (home project) to get my confidence level up.
Thanks in advance.

These are some of the resources I used to get started:
http://www.silverlight.net/learn/handsonlabs/
Following the labs in the first link is a great way to get started, there are videos as well as step-by-step instructions.
Apparently I am not cool enough yet to post multiple hyperlinks so I will try to post these in three different postings.
I am also not cool enough to post multiple answers yet. :|

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Creating an updating GUI, IE Video or Blog service in VB.net Winforms

First of all I would like to thank everyone on this forum, as you have made some of my friends greatest projects successful and I was hoping one of these projects can be done without them.
Now I want to expand to other services. I want to make an app in WinForms or WPF (But im still learning XAML so if you can it would help to answer for winforms) that constantly updates data and displays pictures or video in a row/rows. Like almost Moviebox for iPhone or Showbox for android. How movies are updated constantly without updating the app. (Im not promting piracy, its just the best example I could think of). And when you click on the movie(Which is a picture) it gives a description and picture and even a youtube video.
It kinda would work like a blog reader.... I think?
I think I will need a server and I will probably need a database. But sadly , i'm still a beginner, but willing to learn. Thanks and if you need any more info, please just ask. :)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br211380.aspx?cs-save-lang=1&cs-lang=vb#code-snippet-2 The answer! I think? Any helpers?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br211380.aspx?cs-save-lang=1&cs-lang=vb#code-snippet-2 This MSDN example explained everything I needed in full!

how to get a smartclient example on the web?

I'm pretty much totally lost.. I've posted twice on the smartclient forums and gotten no help so maybe the people here are more friendly than their own staff. (it really bothers me but they appear to have the best software for what I'm trying to do)
I'm trying to wrap my head around how I would get one of their examples (the demo showcase ones which I have downloaded etc) on my web host, just to see how it works/play with it, but I couldn't find any forum guides or videos etc on this (documentation is really abysmal for people that don't speak code yet).
Is there some special back-end I need on my web host? Where can I go to figure out how to link the stuff together? Do I have to compile something using java.. etc.
I'm used to just editing stuff in notepad++, uploading it, and hitting refresh, but I'm guessing smartclient isn't that simple, or is it? (I'm just going to use it to make tables from excel spreadsheets that I can filter through, that's it, no fancy application).
Sincerely,
Mr. Totally Lost.
Everything is covered by the guide (page 6) : http://www.smartclient.com/docs/8.2/docs/SmartClient_Quick_Start_Guide.pdf
SmartClient embed everything needed, you will only need a valid JDK installation and the zip provided in their website.

Are there any demo sites that let you test IronRuby with Silverlight?

I want to some very basic IronRuby tests, such as checking the syntax on a regular expression, and if possible would like to be able to do it thorugh my browser. Does anyone know of a site that hosts an IronRuby in Silverlight demo?
1) Have you found/already tried this?
http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/dlrconsole/index.html
Note, this is an older build, so you might wish to follow my 2nd suggestion if you want something a bit fresher:
2) If you have built IronRuby recently from the latest source from GitHub
You should find a Tutorial (which runs in WPF or Silverlight) .
You'd find it here in the source tree
Edit: Also, I know Jimmy has posted recently about some additional work going into this tutorial, so I believe this is being actively worked on.
Edit 2:
3) Perhaps will or will not suffice for your needs, but there is also Gestalt for running IronRuby/IronPython in the browser. This is a recent interesting development from mix online labs.
John Lam, the original iron Ruby guy, has a tutorial for doing just what you ask at:
http://www.iunknown.com/2008/03/dynamic-silverl.html

Silverlight Architecture Guidance - Lazy Loading

Background: We have an offshore group working up a Silverlight 2 prototype for us. There is the conception that we need to be very concerned with lazy loading of various "screens"/parts of the application. The offshore group has decided to dynamically load assemblies in order to achieve this; however, I would think MS has already dealt with this issue.
Question: Does Silverlight already deal with loading assemblies in an intelligent manner or is that something that we will have to be concerned with?
Cut+paste from my existing answer on another question.. Jesse Liberty has some decent tutorials on multi-page Silverlight apps:
Tutorial
and
Update
You can make your initial app nothing more than a basic "stub" and then load the other bits once you at least have some GUI available. Doesn't come out of the box, but it's straightforward to do.
Tim Heuer has a good video explaining how you can dynamicly load assemblies at runtime:
http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideo.aspx?video=65687
There should also be a version of the Prism toolkit from the Microsoft PnP people sometime in the 1st quarter that will help with that.
Silverlight does have a built in ability to fetch various bits of the application in an on demand basis. However all these bits would be listed initially in the manifest.
However I suspect your partners are thinking in terms of dynamically determining new chunks of the application being downloaded and displayed even after the intial xap has been built.
I don't think you should be too concerned about this, its not actually excessively difficult to achieve.

finding a "semi-pro" project for Silverlight, suggestions?

I'd like to get my feet wet in Silverlight. I think all the reading and tutorials in the world don't work nearly as well as a real project. Plus I've done tutorials, read some books, listened to podcasts and so on. I'm ready for the next step. I'm not sure how to make that step though. I'm certainly not ready to put "Silverlight development" on the resumé with any confidence. Some options:
get on elance and make some lowball bids for RIAs, assuming that part of my compensation is the experience
craigslist
find a designer who needs a programmer - already asked all my designer friends ;)
I'd like to find a non-profit ideally, it'd be cool if I felt like I was helping while I was learning. But that seems like a longshot. I'd really want it to be a publicly facing website so I can use it as a bit of a portfolio piece. And I'd be willing to work for free, or a sliding scale sort of fee. I'm not a designer, so I'd need some help in that dept. I've got some experience with that, but it was so long ago and I don't delude myself about my skills.
I've got about 4 yrs experience in ASP.NET, Winforms and C#.
Suggestions for finding this mythical project?
There is no shortage of non-profits who would love to have someone build software for them, and they don't care what technology it is (this is more or less the sentiment of any customer). I found a non-profit that has a technology need and I'm using ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight to fulfill that need, though admittedly with free time at a premium it's not progressing nearly as fast as a "paid" project. So, my advice is to find a non-profit whose mission you believe in and just send them an email. I doubt they'll turn you down.
Alternatively, help me out! :)
My first, and unfinished, project in Silverlight was started in November 2007. I was designing a poll map of the US in which the user could see realtime vote count, hover over a state and get a detailed breakdown. Similar to John King's Magic Map.
My newborn twins were three months old at the time, so I didn't have a chance to finish it but it was great experience. Silverlight is great for very visual applications. Some more ideas:
Anything geographical, like the polling stuff. There is a free XAML USA map available, Google "XAML USA map".
Graphs, charts, etc. There are some third-party controls available for this or you could experiment with rolling your own.
Drag and Drop type interfaces can really pop with Silverlight.
Games! (My personal favorite)
Here are some ideas:
Make a easily-skinnable shopping cart in Silverlight that integrates with an e-commerce back-end system
I'd try to join an existing Silverlight open source project as a contributor like
this Silverlight Ribbon project on CodePlex.

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