Component maker implements Silverlight
March 18, 2008 —
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Microsoft’s Silverlight is beginning to move beyond an association with mere eye candy and take up a new role with component makers such as Infragistics, which envisions it being used to build line-of-business applications.
Yesterday, Infragistics unveiled NetAdvantage for Silverlight, a suite of prototype components for Silverlight 2. The first Silverlight beta was released in early March, at MIX08 in Las Vegas.
NetAdvantage for Silverlight will include charts, grids and navigation controls for Silverlight. Jason Beres, director of product management at Infragistics, said that it would initially ship between 10 and15 data visualization controls when Silverlight 2 goes gold, sometime after August.
The proof is often in the results, and the company is indeed doing more than talking. Beres noted that Infragistics has already built a sales dashboard called faceOut using Silverlight controls as a proof-of-concept for its customers to tire-kick the platform and its capabilities. The faceOut prototype combines enterprise sales data with feeds from Windows Live Contacts and Windows Live Maps services.
The advantage of using Silverlight to build line-of-business applications, Beres explained, is its cross-platform reach and productivity gains for developers. Microsoft expects to offer Silverlight runtimes for most major Web browsers and operating systems, including Linux—via Mono Moonlight, which is not yet in a packaged state—and Mac OS X, in the form of a plug-in for both Firefox and Safari that Microsoft released last September.
More specifically, Beres noted that Microsoft’s Expression Blend design editor streamlines interface styling, shortening Silverlight application development time, and that Silverlight applications are easier to program in comparison to coding with ASP.NET AJAX. Silverlight’s “a richer environment, and you do not need to worry about JavaScript. I am hearing that once you go Silverlight, you really don’t go back” to ASP.NET AJAX, said Beres.
Silverlight 2 incorporates a slimmed-down version of the .NET Framework’s Common Language Runtime (CLR), enabling developers to write applications with CLR languages. It will also ship with its own suite of interface controls.
Catering to Silverlight and WPF
Microsoft’s decision to bundle controls with Silverlight put both Infragistics and Beres in a difficult spot. “Microsoft is our best friend and biggest competitor. They drive us to be more innovative and add new controls, but they had to respond [as well] to customers” that demanded bundled controls. Nevertheless, he noted, there was room for both companies to thrive: “We are doing things [with rich controls that] they are not.”
Related Search Term(s): Infragistics, Microsoft, NetAdvantage, Silverlight
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