On Monday, MS released a new component of their .NET web platform, Silverlight. The rich presentation framework is available on both the Mac and PC platform. How does this fit in the overall web platform architecture picture? Here are a few thoughts and links…
Dan Faber did a nice summary of his presentation here, and Ryan Stewart has a good replay of the 3 key story lines behind Silverlight:
1 – Windows media support for streaming (silverlight 1.0),
2 – A CLR plug-in for Mac and PC so you can the use the .NET framework on the client, and
3) Services – you can put your app up in the MS cloud and they will host and deliver for you.
Item 2 requires Silverlight 1.1, which is in alpha form now. Having universal access to .NET stuff give you multi-lingual support, the WPF UI framework and rich controls. Additionally there is HTML DOM Integration, networking goods and LINQ query processor and caching. Additionally .NET is much faster than JavaScript.
I listened to the keynote, and I picked up a number of things. They have abstracted UI design into a tool called Expressions. FWIW, this was new to me…not new to the world. You can then use another tool called Blend that lets you composite the assets developed in Expressions together. The output is XAML: a declarative language for defining page objects and properties in XML that can be passed to developers to complete the application logic to bring all the magic together. The demo showed how in Visual Studio you can make silverlight projects that have client and web services based components, writing applications in C#, and you can debug remotely if the client is running on a Mac somewhere. When you bring in the web services based project the programming API’s are made available to VS so all the intellisense stuff works. So the whole .NET set of goods is available, REGARDLESS of platform. They’ve even included IL bindings for Python (they called it Iron Python?), JavaScript, and Ruby.
With the MS live stuff, they are creating a cloud and inviting developers to use it’s tools and services ala Amazon S3.
My lesson from this: Cloud computing is here to stay, and MS developers should continue to rely on MS to evolve the .NET platform and make it easier and easier for them to create rich internet applications (RIA), which is the model for great computing experiences going forward.
