Office Server 2007 Ramblings

of something new....

Microsoft have recently released Silverlight, a rather funky new Adobe Flash/Shockwave killer.

I am particularly impressed with what I saw yesterday at Microsoft in Reading,UK.  What follows is a high level overview of what Silverlight is and is capable of.

 

What is it?
Silverlight is a slimmed down lightweight web-based version of the Windows Presentation Foundation that is cross-browser and cross-platform.  It fills a gap in Microsoft’s product line for providing an engaging experience across multiple browsers and platforms allowing for richer interactive applications being provided to a much broader set of platforms and browsers.

If you were to compare it with existing products it would probably be most like Adobe Shockwave (what was once Macromedia Shockwave)…  Since I have been out of touch with Shockwave for a while I can’t say how similar it is right now. E.g. Silverlight can integrate with Web Services... I don’t know if Shockwave can do that….

Here is a brief summary of Silverlight’s features…

• ·         Render video across multiple browsers and platforms without using a specific media player
• ·         Full HD quality support for full screen viewing of videos
• ·         Supports progressive download and buffering
• ·         Silverlight optimises video
• ·         Media support is VC1, WMA, MP3
• ·         Video streaming in version 1.1 in a few months
• ·         Chapter visualisation
• ·         ASP .NET, AJAX and Silverlight can all interoperate with each other
• ·         Animation
• ·         Vector based
• ·         Definitions of objects are in XAML
• ·         Event handlers can be in ASP .NET or Javascript to handle Silverlight events
• ·         Communication with web services
• ·         Lightweight plug-in, no requirement on web server, placed on page using HTML object tags
• ·         Controls can be defined in a separate library using XAML & C#

 

Examples of possible applications…

• ·         Movie Trailers website
• ·         Plane ticket booking system with very easy to use and pretty interface (drag & drop)
• ·         Data visualisation, graphing
  
• ·         Sweet interface to using a search engine see www.tafiti.com – very nice (try searching for something)
• ·         Pretty menus for applications or the entire application
  

 
OS Support:

• ·         Windows XP, 2003, Vista  (2000 will be in 1.1)
• ·         Mac OS
• ·         Linux
• ·         Novell (Moonlight not yet released by Novell but soon)

Browser Support:

• ·         IE
• ·         Firefox
• ·         Safari

 

Version 1.1 additional features that are not in 1.0 - (1.1 will be a fully compatible superset of 1.0)
It is worth noting that version 1.1 is currently in Alpha and won’t be available for a few months yet.

• ·         Default Controls, set of definitions e.g. buttons (currently you have to make your own; not that hard though – can be defined in a separate library using XAML & C#)
• ·         Lightweight .NET framework CLR called CoreCLR (bare essence of the framework, exact contents still being worked out)
• ·         Larger plug-in download due to CLR ; still very small though – currently 1.0 is around 1MB, likely to be around 4MB for 1.1, but depends on what they keep & throw out between now & release date for the CLR)
• ·         Dynamic Language Runtime; client-side support within the plug-in for dynamic languages such as Python(currently the most advanced), Ruby, Dynamic VB, C#, Javascript (DLR will probably grow beyond Silverlight and become something in it’s own right like the .NET CLR)
• ·         Video Streaming

·         …there are others but these are the most significant…

 

Tooling

Tools that are available for working with Silverlight are as follows:

• ·         Expression Design (for drawing stuff)
• ·         Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 with Silverlight tools installed (for coding; XAML and C#)
• ·         Expression Blend 2 September Preview (for animation and blending the drawings with the code, also worth noting is that the results of Expression Design is XAML so that if you copy and paste between Design and Blend it pastes XAML which generates the images) ; blend can open or generate a Visual Studio 2008 solution which can then be continually edited by Blend and VS or vice versa, generated in VS and then opened in Blend
• ·         Expression Encoder (for transcoding videos to be Silverlight optimised from any format)

 

 
Conclusion

I think this is a very cool piece of technology and has the ability to provide some very neat interfaces, especially in version 1.1 when you will be able to host .Net apps within the plug-in. I think this is the beginning of something very good.  It's about time some competition appeared to take on Adobe Flash and Shockwave.  Although they are ok as solutions, they are painful to use when contrasted against this new tech from MS.  I hope to use this for funky menus in Sharepoint and for data visualisation.

It is worth also noting that MS are currently offering free hosting at silverlight.live.com, apparently there can be charges though if your site becomes very succesfull and has large hit counts.

Another handy resource is silverlight.net 

Have fun lighting up the world with silvery shiny things...........

 

shiny