Jun 13th, 2007
Daybreak for Silverlight!
Microsoft’s Adobe Flashkiller has left it’s cradle: Silverlight, previously known as WPF/E (part of the .NET 3.0 Framework) is amongst us! I agree that this release couldn’t have come at a worse time, some time ago Sun released JavaFX and Adobe has launched Flex 2. Although Silverlight will probably have a tough time converting the non-(msft.)believers to the platform, but one has to admit Silverlight’s features look most promising. Msft. has even guaranteed that they’d make work of cross platform plugins for Silverlight (A MACOSX plugin is already available).
What makes Silverlight different from any other rich client-side application is that all markup is actualy stored in a nice and nifty XML format called XAML. The XAML format can be consired like a kind of nextgen HTML. Because these rich & interactive documents are stored in a textual format (XML), the applications can be searched through by a search engine. This is something no competitor of Silverlight is able to do. And because searchability is especially important for websites (think of an online store), this might be what will lift Silverlight of it’s cradle and will motivate it’s insertion into the WWW.
Yet another thing which suggest the future dominance of Silverlight as the future technology for rich-media websites is Expression Blend (2). Expression Blend supports the design of Silverlight application (using XAML offcourse) in both a graphic and programmatic setting. Together with future Silverlight support of the Visual Studio IDE, this makes design and development of these next-gen webapplications a whole lot easier as oppose to JavaFX, for which you should have installed a couple of programs and framework for it to launch.
I’ve checked out the alpha version and it took me about 5 minutes to have my first Silverlight app up and running. I’m impressed! If your not, you should definitely check out some of the Silverlight reference sites:
I was really BLOWN away after seeing some examples of the technology, there’s a real chemistry between both presentation and content. This IS the future of the web…
) in which they stated: “If there’s one series you most definetly need to watch, it’s Battlestar Galactica“. So taking their advice, I started watching the series and I have to say I’m blown away by it’s outrageously facinating storyline. I can’t believe it took me this long before discovering the series but I’m glad I’ve now got over 30 episodes left to watch! If you want to start watching I suggest you watch the 2 pilot episodes first, our local tv-station (VT4) jumped directly into the series and I think some events and characters aren’t really cleared out properly, just my 2 cents!