Aaron’s Blog

Silverlight and where it is now

I’m always looking for ways to improve the websites I develop for people and my new interest is Silverlight.

Microsoft table this as:
“Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.”

It’s only in it’s early stages yet but it has the workings of being a very useful and powerful tool. There are many things I have noticed that it cannot currently do simply but it should be noted that companies like Adobe/Macromedia have been working of presentation technologies for the web for a good few years now.

Once of the main limitations in the current versions of Silverlight are the lack of input controls such as simple textbox entry and webcam support. It seems that initially the technology has it’s focus on presentation of pre-made content and will couple quite nicely with Windows Media Server.

So if you are looking for a method to deliver content such as videos with a delicious and simple to create interface then look no further than using Silverlight. Adobe currently has a massive lead in this field but if Microsoft can eat into it like they have eaten into Search Engines and search features then there’s a good chance that in 1-2 years even the most die-hard Flash developers will be considering Silverlight.

I think the current strength of the Silverlight offering is it’s integration with Visual Studio that will allow C# developers and the like to vastly improve their content presentation. Lord knows that techies do not make the best-looking things.

I’ll be initially looking at using Silverlight to stream videos from a Windows Media Server but I hope that when the newer versions of the Framework become available they will integrate webcams and use input to a useful and intuitive level.

You can’t really say something is platform and browser-independent if you can’t give the user the same experience across the board. My reason for saying this is that some techies are getting excited about Media encoding with Silverlight when it’s not natively a part of the package. For me the two need to go hand in hand before I will recommend using Silverlight over Java or Flash media gathering when I know that my users may not be on Microsoft platforms.

It looks good Microsoft so please don’t wimp out on us. This could be the start of something great

Tags: Silverlight