Silverlight Development

I am working on a Silverlight 2.0 project right now and got pointed to Tim Heuer's blog on one of my queries and found out that Tim is now working on the Silverlight team along with Jesse Liberty. Tim is a great guy who lives in the Phoenix area and helped me when I was a consultant with Sogeti, as our local Microsoft developer evangelist. If you're working with Silverlight and have any questions, check out his blog: ~ Method Of Failed ~. Aside from that, I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to learn XAML and the Silverlight model. I previously had no WPF experience (my .NET 3.0 experience was limited to WCF), so I had no prior knowledge of XAML, but was able to pick it up pretty quickly. Granted, I made (and keep making) plenty of newbie mistakes, but overall the learning curve has been pretty gentle. Of course, coming from the perspective of working with Microsoft CAB and the Smart Client Software Factory, just about anything else will have a gently learning curve... but that's a topic for another post altogether. By the way, if you're working with that stuff, Ward Bell rocks.

Rebooting the Web

If you're not a geek like myself, you probably haven't heard about Silverlight, Microsoft's new web technology. As both a web developer and a client developer using the .NET platform, I see the strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the thick/thin client coin. Silverlight, especially Silverlight 2.0, blurs these lines. It allows developers to write what are essentially client applications on the web. A few years ago, AJAX (using a technology created by Microsoft, and made popular by sites such as Google Maps), greatly enhanced web applications by doing away with the page refreshes between mouse clicks. This allowed developers to create a new generation of web applications that behaved more like client applications. This revolution was called Web 2.0. It was a great improvement, however web applications were still handicapped by the visual confines of HTML and the browser. Of course, a compelling user experience could still be created with Flash, but that meant that the Flash content would not be indexed by a search engine. Silverlight is the next evolution of the web. As Jeff Prosise put it last year, Microsoft "rebooted the web" by giving developers a declarative programming model using XML (XAML), that allows for the creation of Flash-like user interfaces that can also be indexed be search engines (not to mention it has killer performance). In the past year since the announcement of Silverlight (formerly WPF/E), there have been some great ideas developed around it. Most early adopters used Silverlight simply for streaming HD-video, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the Silverlight Showcase to see what is possible with Silverlight 1.0. Silverlight 2.0, currently in Beta 1, expands on the Silverlight model by including a version of the .NET platform to write code against. This opens the door for .NET developers who have never touched Flash to write applications on the web that provide experiences that users never thought possible on the web. It will be interesting to see how quickly this technology (or alternatively, Flex, but I'm rooting for Silverlight) is adopted and how the web will be transformed. It is an exciting time to be a web developer.