Archive for April, 2009

Silverlight 3.0

Posted in Silverlight on April 1st, 2009 by gnauck – 2 Comments

Silverlight 3 has been announced at MIX09 for late summer this year. According to Microsoft the Silverlight browser plugin is installed on 300 millions machines, Adobe Flash on 950 million machines. So Silverlight catches up here very fast.

Silverlight adoption has the potential to happen very fast because of the following reasons:

  • There is a continuous trend towards rich Internet applications. Of course good developers can create great web applications with HTML, DHTML, Ajax, JQuery and other technologies. But with Silverlight every average developer is
    able to do the same in less time. This brings products faster to the market and gives you an advantage over your competitors.
  • Silverlight opens rich Internet web development to all of the 4+ million .NET developers worldwide without learning new technologies and programming languages.
  • Another big advantage with the upcoming Silverlight version is that applications can run out of the browser as regular (cross platform) desktop applications without no code changes.
  • You can also reuse most of the code to build regular .NET WPF desktop application, or vice versa. It is pretty easy to port WPF desktop applications to Silverlight, because Silverlight is using a WPF subset for the GUI.

For existing c# or vb .NET developers Silverlight is very attractive because existing skills can be reused with the same base class library without laerning new technolgies. When do you start Silverlight hacking?