Having spent the last 9 months working with Silverlight on a daily basis, I’ve grown to love it and hate it – on a roughly 80% - 20% split. The love is down to its power and potential, the things that are possible – and (having gained expertise throughout our team) the speed with which we can now create something really cool (request in the morning scrum, prototype for lunch, integrated design and code by 5.30). The pain is found in Expression Blend’s ‘quirks’, the development process, and the struggle to allow a view led approach with our complex application architecture.
Regardless, having invested so much in a new technology – we’re very keen to see where Microsoft intends taking Silverlight, and us with it. So, it is with not inconsiderable anticipation that I look forward to MIX sessions like the following:
“What’s New in Microsoft Silverlight 3”
Take a tour of the new features in Silverlight 3 including a dive into some of the new experience oriented features like pixel shaders, perspective 3D, animation enhancements, bitmap APIs and improvements to the media stack. Also hear about new Silverlight base framework additions including updates to the style model, data binding improvements, improved resource handling and improvements to the web services stack.
It’s all understandably vague – ‘enhancements’ and ‘improvements’ are fairly subjective words, so I guess we’ll have to be the judges. It all sounds very positive though, and I’d guess that some of those improvements have been borne out of the feedback provided by the community.
I believe it’s the integration of tools like pixel shaders and perspective 3D which will really help Silverlight stand on its own as an RIA platform. Judging by the rumblings from Redmond, this also seems to be the hope and intention of Microsoft for future releases of Silverlight.
At present, to the uninitiated it is seen simply as an alternative to Flash/Flex, and as such – viewed as an unnecessary attempt by Microsoft to muscle in on the RIA space, attracting the negative attention common to those who consider a company the size of Microsoft to be a generally ‘bad thing’ irrespective of reason.
It’s intriguing that this session is scheduled very early on in proceedings, but not surprising. This is what everyone wants to hear, and I suspect will generate more discussion that Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie’s keynotes. Ok, perhaps not – but I wonder if there will be parallels and lines to be drawn between both.
My objective for this session and beyond is to find out how integrated these new tools and practices are, how they can be used, and if all this new functionality is going to bloat Silverlight. 10 years ago, the current Silverlight 2 download of around 4MB would have been considered outrageous. Now, it’s half the size of an image taken by a modern digital camera… which considering the power packed into that little bundle of joy is pretty bloody impressive really.
I hope the improvements to the Style model allow better separation of the code and UI, reducing my levels of hate (obviously a ‘good thing’ for all concerned; especially those who sit within earshot), and I expect the more tangible tools and feature will likely increase my love quota (insert Barry White background music here).
Either way, along with the ‘Future of Expression Blend’ session, (in fact, and all the other sessions on my list) I’m pretty excited about what news this week will bring. See you there if you’re going, and if not – I’ll be blogging what I learn along with countless others, no doubt.
(just read that MIX attendees will be receiving a new book on Silverlight 3, too. Result!)