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

By Patrick Hynds

July 31, 2012 — (Page 6 of 7)
Hollis provides his formula for insulating against these kinds of disruptions at the presentation layer. He said that you should “get a strategy for building a navigation shell in place very early. This is, more or less, the analog of what MVC does for websites, but in Silverlight, the navigation shell normally works on the client machine. There are several choices out there to use as starting points, and all of them will need additional work to fit an organization’s needs. Getting an appropriate shell in place improves user experience and speeds up development all through the process.”

ComponentOne’s Fustino said he also believes design is the key to surviving the tides. “The great data-binding in Silverlight allows developers to easily separate the display logic from the business logic and create more maintainable applications,” he said. This separation of concerns is something that has been advised often in the past and is more important now than ever.

Fear and future versions
Even before Windows 8 was announced in September 2011 at the Build Conference, the developer community and blogosphere were buzzing about the hints that Metro and the new XAML development were the beginning of the end for Silverlight. The fear persists even after Silverlight 5 was released.

Microsoft has already released an update to Silverlight 5 in the form of a patch. The 5.1 patch does not add new features or capabilities. The conspiracy theory crowd has pointed to this as proof that there will not be a version after Silverlight 5, since many of the items fixed in the patch could wait until a service release. In light of recent displays of near-perfect secrecy, it is more likely that either Microsoft is keeping its options open in this regard, or it does not want to provide clues.

Time will of course tell if Silverlight 5 finds its stride. It is still early, but a bellwether I consider worth watching is the showcase of applications at Silverlight.net. If you look at the Silverlight 3 applications submitted, you will see there are only a few (literally three when last I looked). The Silverlight 4 showcase is bursting with applications. As of this writing, more than six months beyond the release of Silverlight 5, there are no applications listed.

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

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Microsoft has focused on making Silverlight 2 symmetric with the .NET platform, and that has helped developers work with Silverlight based on their pre-existing knowledge of .NET. Improvements to video quality and XAML-writing documentation were also added to Silverlight Read More...