Basketball Play Designer in Silverlight 3

Silverlight is an exciting new technology that provides a cool platform for building EMBED’able applications and complete web sites using Visual Studio and Expression Blend. There are numerous features that are worth exploring, but my favorite is the seperation of the UI/UX and the implementation, along with Expression Blend.

Being a C#/C++ software guy with some graphical design skills, this is a perfect match. In this article, we’ll create the start of a Silverlight application for designing basketball plays. The finished product’s looks can change quite a bit, but the functionality remains the same:

In the first video clip you will learn how to create the project in Visual Studio and the static visual layout in Expression Blend.

In part 2, you will learn how to create and wire up dynamic controls and event handlers and create the associated C# code.

Although this is just a simple demo, the next steps for this type of application could include:

• Drag and drop animation
• Better styling (buttons, etc)
• Passing and dribbling
• Record and playback
• Save plays and play templates (e.g., ‘2-3 zone’)

Download Source: SilverlightBasketballSample.zip (316KB)