Where is Silverlight going? (or-- Why Silverlight will succeed)

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Cows (livestock) produce 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the cars and trucks on earth. -- U.N. report

I've been watching the buzz around Silverlight 2 Beta 1 since it came out, and there's a new beta that will be out this week (yes, I was the guy that asked Scott Guthrie when it would be released at the MVP Summit conference).  If you look at my "Playground" short url site with a Silverlight tag query, IttyUrl.net, you'll see hundreds of new Silverlight - related links, as developers and pundits post their creations, articles, and streaming videos to show what they've learned and to share their techniques.

The underlying Silverlight technologies (XAML/WPF/WCF and .NET) are encouraging client-side Windows developers to think beyond boring forms apps and get into the promising world of vector graphics with 3D, streaming HD media and "animated everything". Microsoft is simply extending existing proven technology to  encourage developers to use the power of the client-side to ensure that "Windows" apps continue to make web-apps look boring.  There's even a Maya plugin to export a Maya rendering as XAML -- which you can use in Silverlight!

The Silverlight .NET runtime enables developers to provide cutting edge multimedia user experience in the browser. I am seeing that a  lot of Air, Flex and Flash pundits don't fully understand that Silverlight is not a Flash substitute. .NET developers can use the exact same development assets, paradigms and tools they know and love -- .NET objects, Controls, Visual Studio, WCF, WebServices and more.

If you stop to think about it, Silverlight and its OOP .NET foundation are the perfect platform to web-enable Microsoft Office and similar apps - you have IsolatedStorage for client -side  OOP persistence, and all is built - in to a security - protected execution sandbox.

Silverlight is now getting positioned as the new web-based .NET application platform. It will soon be on Nokia phones, Linux workstations and OSX. The MONO people are putting it on Linux ("Moonlight"), with Microsoft's blessing.  Even the iPhone could run Silverlight, since it runs the full Safari browser. And now, I've just read that Silverlight will be shipped with millions of HP computers. But -- that's just the beginning;  it is clear to me that Microsoft has determined  Silverlight is the new direction, and they will not stop.

With Silverlight now coming out on Nokia phones, delivered as part of the Olympics coverage, and embedded throughout MS properties and content,  with new deals materializing everywhere, Microsoft is starting to gain enormous distribution potential.  Of course, Microsoft would love to package Silverlight with the Internet Explorer 8.0 install experience - if they can get past the legal hurdles. And that would be, well -- huge.

I believe that Silverlight is a critical and consummate technological strategy from the Redmond Mother-Ship. It allows them to leverage proven tools and technologies from the client, set the accepted minimum standards higher on web-based experiences, deploy client-side apps through the browser, and broaden the MS platform reach into every device and screen comprising a user’s experience on the web.

You can read a lot of pundits claiming "Why Silverlight will fail", etc. Typically they will say that you don’t really understand the rival technology but have already decided that you'll be using Silverlight because it’s from Microsoft. They will extoll all the server-side technologies you can do with Flex, Adobe LiveCycle, J2EE, etc. But they forget that Silverlight runs a subset of the .NET Framework ON THE CLIENT - in the browser, and that it supports dynamic languages. They will say things like, "Open your eyes, MS fanboys".

The anti-Microsoft "Why SIlverlight will fail" fanboys are just that - their better judgement has been completely obfuscated by their fanatic, fallacious belief that if something comes from Microsoft, it has to be "bad". Boy, are they going to be proven wrong. And - it won't take very long, either.

 

My 2 cents.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous9:49 PM

    Silverlight has major potential, but I still won't install it because of those relentless ads on MSDN!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chris7:43 AM

    It only took over a decade for VRML to be realised! :P

    Throughout your post you mention how great it will be for multimedia applications, but what about as a delivery method for business application developers?

    Currently I'm looking at web-enabling an application that previously existed in a legacy language, and we've been exploring things such as Flex and OpenLaszlo, and in my spare time I've been tinkering with WPF (albeit without any of the Expression tools).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous8:14 AM

    Nice One Peter

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous10:06 AM

    I'm a Silverlight developer, and I like Silverlight a lot. I'm working on an application which benefits a lot from the capabilities of Silverlight.

    I do take issue with the mantra of "boring form application" -- they might be boring for you, but they're (i) usable for the people who need to use them and (ii) reliable and efficiently developed for the people who pay for them.

    Macromedia has been blathering about how Flash-based apps will replace "boring forms applications" for almost a decade now -- and it hasn't happened.

    I'll grant that Silverlight clears many of the barriers that were in the way of Flex. On the other hand, Flash has been around for a long time with very high market penetration, and a great deal of success for a limited range of applications.

    High development costs, poor usability (usability is 'boring' but fancy animations aren't) are a barrier that Silverlight developers will need to overcome.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous9:39 AM

    Shhhhh...you're not supposed to warn them. It's better if it's a surprise to the closed-minded opinions of the "anything but Microsoft" camp.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous6:13 PM

    I hate to say it people... Silverlight 2,3,4 isn't going to work. It isn't because there isn't enough Microsoft support behind it, it is because Microsoft doesn't get media and Adobe does.

    I hope it catches on, I really do, but it is going to take 5+ years and some fantastic mainstream applications to really have clients asking for Silverlight.

    Right now they are all asking for Flash and that is just the brute honest truth.

    5 years, and we'll see where we are at as MS devs.

    ReplyDelete
  7. peterbromberg8:22 PM

    @anonymous, what's with this "Microsoft doesn't get media and Adobe does"? You want to put some facts behind such a subjective statement? Right now, they are *not* "all" asking for Flash. Some of them are asking for Silverlight, and soon a lot more will be. Competition is good.

    ReplyDelete

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