Thoughts on Silverlight?

[Phil Wright]

Third time's a charm?
A common belief is it takes three versions before Microsoft really gets a new
technology right. Now that Silverlight 3 has been announced at MIX09 it
would seem a good time to take a look at this platform.

WPF, the big brother of Silverlight, has been around since Vista was released
and although a critical success has only slowly gained traction in desktop
development. I think this is because WinForms, despite many shortcomings,
is good enough for most business focused applications. With few 'must have'
reasons to immediately make the jump, adoption is rising but only slowing.

Silverlight adoption has the potential to happen much faster for two reasons.
First is the continuing trend towards richer internet applications. Although
you can create nice websites using Ajax, jQuery and HTML it takes great
developers pushing the limits to achieve it. Silverlight makes it possible for
average developers to do the same but in less time.

The second force is just shear weight of numbers. With about a million .NET
developers in the world you are instantly opening up rich internet development
for them all. Asking a C#/WinForms developer to learn all about Ajax, jQuery,
CSS and so forth is a steep learning curve with no leverage of existing skills.
But ask the same developer to keep using C# and much of the same base class
library and it becomes much more appealing. Plus once you have mastered
Silverlight you can transition that knowledge over to your desktop apps with WPF.

This entire preamble merely explains why I find Silverlight interesting as an area
I should start thinking about. I would like to hear bad about others opinions and
get a discussion going about this topic.

1, Should Component Factory get involved in Silverlight?

2, If so then what type of controls/components/framework would be useful?

[Chris Porter]

I have set on the fence with Silverlight/WPF, not because I'm unsure of its chance for success, but because I only have so many hours in the day. From a technology standpoint, I think they are both very interesting platforms with a lot of possibility. If you haven't seen blu yet, I urge you to check it out: http://www.thirteen23.com/experiences/desktop/blu/.

My favorite "feature" of Silverlight is the cross-platform possibilities. I use a MacBook Pro as my only laptop (still develop and game on XP desktops) and I LOVE OS-X/Mac. The option of creating C#.NET applications that can be deployed and run within OS-X makes me smile. Sure I could play around with Mono and get 80% there but I'd much rather use a fully MS supported platform.

I believe there is room in the SL/WPF environment for CF to settle in and make a nice home. Your attention to detail is impeccable and frankly, I don't think I could trust another developer to provide a component package with anywhere near the quality I've come to expect from CF. With a vector drawn platform opening up possibilities, I think you could build some truely amazing SL/WPF controls.

Until I spend some more time in those environments, I won't have much for suggestions on component ideas but I'll put a few brain cycles into the idea and let you know if I come up with some results.

[jkr]

What can I say? Having played a little with Silverlight I can say it will be a technology for the future. Simple, flexible and so on, Silverlight gives you the power to create better, bigger and feature-rich web applications (don't really care about web sites like shopping carts or youtube look-a-like) so having a ComponentFactory Silverlight ToolKit would be awsome. Even if MS released Silverlight 3 and added controls to their toolkit (http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html) they're just not enough or need more features added.

Looking at other third-party toolkits all I can say is that they have done a great job but still need to work on some controls like DateTime, Grid, Menus and ToolBars, Docking, Reporting. All of these make an application great. Can't really understand the need for controls like Gauges, Cube, Carousel and others. I know they're for management applications (well, only the gauge and charts) but they shouldn't be the main target.

[Cocotteseb]

Hi,

I haven't speak a lot in the forums but follow the posts regularly. Silverlight is indeed promising and as jkr said it will be a technology for the future. To my mind I think the krypton suite/toolkit is already really great but it still misses some basic and advanced components, plus the evolutions with Seven. I will not mention them because it is not the subject here. But if you choose making Silverlight Kryptonised controls it will make you a double work : ie making the new controls and still improving the actual Krypton suite. I "fear" it will slow the updates for the actual Krypton Suite.
Plus if you look at the survey you made there is also WPF (http://www.componentfactory.com/blog/?p=322) which will be important too since it will be part of VS2010 itself.

So personnally I think it would be great to reach the Krypaton 4.0 state as mentionned on the roadmap here : http://www.componentfactory.com/blog/?p=366 in order to have a strong offer in the WinForms controls and then considering adding a new technology (the successor of the WinForms or a new "domain" : the web applications)

[ornus]

silverlight controls would help out web developers. I've been in many situations where I would work on web and I wished Krypton was available there too.

silverlight is here to stay, that's for sure, and I bet you'll get a lot of people interested in silverlight controls. plus it's something different and new from windows programming.