Rick Strahl is talking about his Silverlight adventures in his last post. Check it out here its really something! He is giving us his thoughts on Microsoft’s new technology!
“Well, here we are again - let the hype begin!!! Yup, we have a new toy to get excited about and this time it’s Silverlight or Microsoft’s entry in the Rich Internet Applications (RIA) space. RIA’s are interesting to a lot of developers. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard the request over the years to build richer applications that can run in the browser. If I had a penny for everytime somebody’s asked me - “how can I take and run my Windows app in the browser on the Web” I’d be - not very rich, but a good chunk o’ change would have accumulated. This request dates back a LONG time and one has to ask what took Microsoft so long?
Last week at the Mix ’07 conference Microsoft announced updated plans for a browser based technology called Silverlight (formerly known by the code name of WPF/E). Silverlight is a light-weight, self-contained and browser independent version of the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) that can run inside of a Web Browser without any outside dependencies. Silverlight can run in IE 6 and 7, Firefox and Safari, both on Windows and the Mac and is installed by a single one-click installation that takes only a few seconds.
Microsoft announced two versions of Silverlight: Silverlight 1.0 beta which provides a base set of WPF functionality that is scriptable from an HTML document, and Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, which adds a client side version of the .NET runtime to Silverlight. Yup, this means .NET code in the browser – in various browsers and on Windows and the Mac. I’ll come back to the .NET integration later, but let’s look at the base features of Silverlight first.“