A week or so ago I picked up a new book on Silverlight development by one of the top thought leaders out there in the Silverlight space. Laurent Bugnion is one of the best Silverlight guys out there in my mind. What I like about his posts and presentations is that he makes everything seem simple… even the most complex stuff. He’s been tremendously helpful in advancing my Silverlight experience. He’s also the brains behind the very popular MVVM Light Toolkit. A while back I blogged about how I learned MVVM and expanded on the toolkit here.

Laurent hasn’t been blogging much because he was heads down working on his book, Silverlight 4 Unleashed. I’m giving this two HUGE thumbs up. Let me quote the review I left on Amazon:

This book is *fantastic* and is exactly what's been missing on my desk. There's so much more here than I was hoping for. I love his approach of (paraphrasing) "we've already covered Silverlight 2 so I'm not rehashing it... if you need to reference something 'basic', the PDF of the eBook is now available for free so go get it." He does a fantastic job of explaining things in true color. I especially like the chapters on MVVM and the discussion around Blendability (building apps that run, not break, in Expression Blend.

I strongly recommend this to any Silverlight developer out there. There’s so much more in this book that I expected. If you want the PDF for Silverlight 2 Unleashed like I said in my review, make sure you register the book using the code in the back cover of the book.