Learning Silverlight 4 from ground up

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 t开发者_开发技巧o 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

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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.

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Maybe as a finisher for this you could go through Nikhil Kothari's blog on a BookClub application here. He's quite descriptive and his application covers most of the basics of MVVM, authentication and validations which overall could be used as a reference for your project. Honestly, it helped me quite a bit.

His blog also links to a Mix presentation where he talks you thru this application and how he's built it.

Hope this helps.