Silverlight: Does the new path lead to the end of the road?

By Patrick Hynds

July 31, 2012 — (Page 2 of 7)
Why Silverlight matters
Silverlight was initially introduced in 2007 to serve as Microsoft’s rich Internet application (RIA) platform, and it eventually expanded into niches beyond building RIAs for corporate line-of-business solutions. It has become popular for streaming media for everything from technical training to the Olympics. Finding this special niche has also helped to shape the nature of new features that have evolved in Silverlight.

From the very beginning, Silverlight was to be a strategic play to fill a void in Microsoft’s coverage of developer technology needs. Silverlight introduced Microsoft’s answer to a very real problem that developers had to choose between two extremes, namely native client development or Web development.

Native client development on Windows at the time primarily consisted of building Windows Forms applications or resorting to C++ development. The advantages of native clients include robust access to the underlying hardware systems such as the graphics systems and file system. There is also a standard rendering with no concern for browser versions and such.

The weakness of the native client is limited reach. If an organization needs to allow clients other than Windows, or even just needs to allow the use of the system outside the organization, then installation is either impossible or at least problematic.

Web development does not suffer from the deployment problem of native clients, but introduces a whole raft of other issues in addition to the fact that, over time, browser support makes for a moving target if you really need a consistent experience and care about the solution months after it is initially released.

The concept of a middle ground that solved the problems of both extremes fostered greater interest in plug-in technology and ushered in a surge of interest in Flash development. Not to be left out, Microsoft introduced Silverlight and indicated it would provide an aggressive release cycle from the outset. Silverlight provided an environment to develop a rich Internet application that promised to provide the best of both worlds and to push the drawbacks away.

Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, Silverlight, XAML

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