One Good Use of Silverlight

I talked about my frustration with Silverlight to a couple of people at the recent tri-state community mixer and heard the same thing several times: “I wish I could come up with a project to try Silverlight.” This goes to reinforce my opinion that Silverlight is being pitched to the wrong audience (developers) with the wrong message (“Rich media experience for the masses”).

sIFR + Silverlight

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you may remember .IR — an image replacement technique I derived from sFIR which allowed you to embed Flash with an arbitrary font in place of plain vanilla Arial/Helvetica/Verdana headings. Instead of Flash I used an image-streaming HttpHandler that utilized GDI+. Maximilian Beller even created a server control out of .IR, and Carl Camera kicked it up a notch and came up with ViPR.

Back then I left .IR in beta even though I’ve used it on this site (view this page in a browser to see for yourselves) ever since. I’ve grown sick of endless betas since then. If I put out anything these days, it’s at least ver. 1.0.

It occurred to me that the same technique should be doable and even more flexible with Silverlight. Not surprisingly, it’s already in the works! Filipe Fortes seems to be working on Sistr (sIFR + Silverlight) which you can see in action here. Good stuff! Gotta keep an eye on this development.

I don't think the problem is with the technology or the audience, it is with the perspective. There was a time when the web was only about presentation and linking of information. If they had any, companies generally had an internet presence that was equivalent to a yellow pages ad with a number to call. That has obviously changed.

People originally thought Flash was only good for video, games and ads. That has changed as well.

My colleague and I wrote the Carbon Calculator in Silverlight 1.1. It is not overly media-rich, and it is more like a business app (in fact, in the Silverlight showcase on silverlight.net, it is currently the only business app listed). Once Silverlight 1.1 includes some basic controls out of the box, the business uses will be easier for the general audience of developers to understand.

Think of Silverlight more as your portable clr. Take all those web apps that would have benn 100% easier to write as a windows app, and cnsider how they might be implemented in Silverlight. You'll fnd that some of them, not all of course, would be excellent candidates for a cross-platform CLR with extensive presentation capabilities.

Take all those AJAX apps out there and see how they would do in Silverlight. Silverlight is basically AJAX v.next with excellent UI capabilities and the great addition of being able to use your existing .NET skills to write cross-platform, cross-browser applications. Great stuff!

I blog a bit on Silverlight. Check out some of the examples on my site for how you can use .NET in a cross-platform way.

Just some food for thought :)

i had a chance to try Silverlight technology at asphostcentral.com and everything works perfectly OK. The MIME insertion makes everything works beatifully...:)