The Microsoft Stack: What Silverlight Means to You
By Patrick Hynds
May 15, 2008 — Most IT managers have likely heard the term Silverlight, but unless they are better informed on development technologies than the average development manager, they don’t know what it means.
The most common short answer to the question of “What is Silverlight?” is that it is Microsoft’s version of Flash. While this is probably a good place to start, it is a misleading place to end. Sometime in the last few years, Microsoft realized that cross-platform compatibility has to be part of their repertoire, and we have begun to see Microsoft work to achieve that in the myriad places it plays. Silverlight is, in my opinion, the best of these moves because it promises to bring to rich Internet applications (RIA) the kind of competition that drove the browser innovations of the last decade.
First, let me explain what the Silverlight technology represents and how it can be leveraged. Almost all of Microsoft’s considerable development tools target the Windows OS, with the occasional tip of the hat to Mac OS X. The strategy is that if developers are building applications for your platform, and they are happy with the high-productivity tools, then the consumers and businesses will be hard-pressed to buy other, less well-served platforms.
What this strategy has ignored is that the world is a multiplatform place and organizations and individuals often swim in multiplatform pools. Mac is currently the most visible of these alternatives. There is a perception by many, even devoted Microsoft fans, that Apple has really got the hardware right. Scores of people in my immediate circle run Microsoft operating systems on Apple hardware.
There are really three choices for the broad types of applications that can be built (maybe this is a gross simplification, but for the purposes of the topic you will see that it is an appropriate characterization). The standard native client is the original type, most often written in C++ and requiring deployment on the client system. The advantage here is that the application can bring the full weight and power of the client to bear on the user experience.
At the end of the client/server era, the Web application took the stage in large part because it eliminated some of the nastier aspects of the deployment problem, but there were and still are severe limitations as to what can be done when compared to a native client built to run on the client operating system. Adobe filled the gap long ago with Flash and the supporting technologies that have many of the benefits of both systems, including cross-platform capability and rich content, but it still isn’t the best of both worlds. There are things you just can’t do in Flash that can be done on a native client, and Flash development skills are not ubiquitous.
Enter Silverlight, a bit late to the party given how long Flash has been around, but better late than never. Now there is a choice of technologies to build applications in this middle space, with Microsoft playing the upstart to Adobe’s old establishment.
What Silverlight does is give developers from the Microsoft side the ability to leverage their existing skills to create RIAs similar to what Flash development has offered for so long. Any of the .NET languages can be used for the programming logic of a Silverlight application, with the graphical aspects (think designers) being written in a new markup called XAML. The current version of Silverlight is still a bit limited, but works on systems other than Windows, just like Adobe’s Flash, and the new capabilities in the next version—already in beta—are extensive.
The biggest drawback for Silverlight is that until the installed base of systems running the Silverlight client hits above 50 percent, it might not put enough pressure on Adobe to spawn innovations that would benefit everyone. I am a big fan of competition. It drives the pace of advances much more quickly as we have seen repeatedly, especially in the Web space (i.e., the browser wars and the rapid developments in Web server technology).
Already the next version of Silverlight—which was once called Silverlight 1.1 but has evolved enough to be called Silverlight 2.0—includes features that set it apart from Microsoft’s current Web applications in terms of abilities that can’t reasonably be made to work with a pure browser-based application. These include file IO capabilities that let you interact with the local client file system.
There are few companies capable of making a play like this and emerging dominant. Microsoft is one of those few, and while the vote of the user community is still not in, of course, I will go out on a limb and predict that over the next few years, Adobe will ramp up the innovation to match or keep ahead of Microsoft. If Microsoft simply leapfrogs over Flash, then we will only get an incremental bump in functionality in this mid-space of development, and that would be a shame.
For those of us on the IT side left to support the applications that developers create for our users, this is an important space. For the most part the RIAs are easier to support than either their native or purely Web based cousins. It all comes down to having the client installed. Isn’t version 3.0 always the best one anyhow?
Patrick Hynds is the president of the consulting firm CriticalSites and has been appointed as a Microsoft Regional Director for his expertise on Microsoft technology. He can be reached at phynds@criticalsites.com.
Related Search Term(s): Microsoft
Share this link: http://www.sysmannews.com/link/32194