.NET similarities prove golden for Silverlight

By Jeff Feinman

November 19, 2008 —

SD Times is talking to developers about what they look for in rich Internet application platforms. Here, developers talk about why the symmetry between .NET and Silverlight 2 make using Silverlight easier.When Microsoft’s Silverlight media player streamed 2,200 hours of live coverage of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing this summer, developers took notice.

NBC’s Olympic website streamed more than 70 million videos, or 600 million minutes’ worth, over the games’ two-week duration via Microsoft’s rich Internet application (RIA) and media platform. According to Microsoft, Olympic exposure has resulted in unprecedented beta deployments for version 2 of Silverlight, and some big customers have gone live with it. Among the companies that have adopted Silverlight for website media are Blockbuster, CBS College Sports, Hard Rock Cafe and Toyota.

“We looked at [Adobe] Flash and some other platforms, but we saw Silverlight as a viable solution, and what made it even more [appealing was that the Olympics went] with it,” said Raymond Bridgelall, CBS College Sports’ manager of streaming services and product development.

From a development standpoint, Microsoft focused on providing more symmetry with the .NET platform in Silverlight version 2, released in mid-October. The software giant’s RIA offering now includes a cross-platform subset of the .NET framework so that users can deploy multiple programming languages to build applications. At the same time, Microsoft executives said, developers can learn just one language and one common programming model for building .NET applications on the desktop and Silverlight applications in the browser. Thus developers have greater freedom in how they structure projects.

Some .NET developers have called Silverlight a natural progression in the .NET space. Rockford Lhotka, principal technology evangelist for Minnesota-based IT consulting firm Magenic, has created a Silverlight version of CSLA .NET, an open-source .NET development framework for simplifying the production of Windows Forms, Web Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Web Services.

Lhotka, who authored the books “Expert VB Business Objects” and “Using CSLA .NET 3.0,” said developers with C# or Python programming expertise and with WPF applications experience can leverage those skills when using Silverlight, whereas Adobe Flash and Flex require a different skill set.

Many Flex developers have said that a background in Java can be helpful when learning Flex’s ActionScript language because the languages have similar object-oriented characteristics. In Silverlight’s case, C# and Visual Basic can serve as that prerequisite.

“I wasn’t interested in investing that much time learning something new when there is a really compelling technology that requires less effort on my part,” Lhotka said. “It amazes me how much of the .NET functionality is in Silverlight. We’ve been able to build pretty much everything we wanted to build for business applications, and Silverlight has virtually all the functionality we’ve been looking for.”

Lhotka said he uses Visual Studio to develop Silverlight applications, just as he does for .NET development. Silverlight thus lets him work in a familiar development environment using C# and Visual Basic.

Additionally, Lhotka’s previous work with WPF, which uses Extensible Application Markup Language, shortened his learning curve for Silverlight, which likewise uses XAML. One caveat: Silverlight’s XAML implementation is not exactly the same as WPF’s, so developers with experience in both need to determine the differences. But that won’t be a concern for developers who are still working with Web Forms or Windows Forms and haven’t yet moved to WPF, Lhotka said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft released the Silverlight XAML Vocabulary as part of the Silverlight version 2. The offering provides specs and documentation to help Silverlight users read and write XAML.

Microsoft also focused on crisper video in Silverlight 2. For CBS College Sports, “one of the advantages of going with Silverlight is that all our content is Windows Media-based,” said Bridgelall. “Because of the Windows Media back end that we have here [for] live events streaming, we needed something that integrated seamlessly in terms of our schools and internally.”

CBS College Sports runs more than 275 official athletic websites for such institutions as the University of Alabama, Notre Dame, Texas A&M and the University of Southern California. Silverlight is being used to stream live sporting events and on-demand content for approximately 11,000 live school events per year. Down the line, CBS College Sports will look to add high-definition and picture-in-picture capabilities, Bridgelall said.

When developing its live-event streaming capabilities, Bridgelall said, CBS College Sports benefited from the use of Microsoft Expression Blend, a design tool that lets developers and designers see the same information when working on a website project. “The designer basically has the tools to see what the developer sees,” he said.

SUBHED: Data binding and debug
Bridgelall said CBS College Sports hadn’t run into any difficulties using Silverlight, though he added that the operation’s deployment of the platform was still fairly new.

Lhotka, who has logged more time with Silverlight, said its asynchronous communications with the server could be a problem for developers who use traditional Web Forms and thus might be unaccustomed to dealing with asynchronous server calls, which can influence how a developer creates the user interface and writes business logic.

“I suspect that people who have been doing a lot of AJAX development will have an easier time adapting … because AJAX is already asynchronous,” Lhotka said.

He added that his team had encountered some incomplete features and bugs because it had worked with beta versions of the software. Most of those issues should have been resolved with the release of Silverlight 2, he said.

One of the “pleasant surprises” for Lhotka, meanwhile, was that Silverlight deploys transparently, so after the runtime was installed, his applications deployed and worked out of the gate.

Some developers who have used Flex have noted that the Adobe platform provides strong debugging capabilities via its Eclipse-based IDE. They also have praise for Flex’s data binding capabilities.

Lhotka said debugging in Silverlight is comparable to debugging .NET applications. XAML has its own data binding technology, Lhotka added, asserting that “the XAML data binding experience is the best data binding technology Microsoft has done yet.”

But he noted that WPF offers some data tabulating capabilities that are lacking in Silverlight. “Looking beyond 2.0, I hope [Microsoft continues to improve Silverlight’s] data binding and give it more parity with WPF,” Lhotka said. “That’s probably the biggest thing I hope for."

Related Search Term(s): .NET, RIA, Silverlight, XAML, Microsoft

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Microsoft focuses on wide Silverlight 2 implementation With tomorrow's release of Silverlight 2, Microsoft says that .NET integration will allow for crisper and faster video streams, and it is aiming at making Silverlight as widely adopted as possible. Also, Microsoft is funding a project to meld Silverlight with Eclipse.

Microsoft, Adobe wage verbal battle over RIAs After Adobe CFO Mark Garrett said Silverlight has “fizzled out” in the last few months, Tim Sneath, Microsoft’s director of client platform evangelism, responded, saying his team is working overtime to handle requests from people adopting Silverlight.

Minimal interest in Silverlight? An Alfresco survey finds that more than 90% of its community members do not intend to use Microsoft Silverlight. Eighty-six percent said that they do not intend to use .NET or Web Parts.

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