Even a chimp can write code

Thursday, April 19, 2007

What does Silverlight mean to you?

Mike Harsh, fellow program manager on the team and all-round great guy, was manning the Silverlight booth at the NAB Show, doing demos and talking to customers. He says: "I have never been involved with any technology that has this level of excitement and interest, and I’ve never given demos to so many people who’ve walked away with a smile on their faces. After seeing the demos it sinks in very quickly that Silverlight will let them do incredible things with their existing Windows Media assets using all their existing delivery infrastructure." Read that last statement carefully. It touches on what we think is the essence of Silverlight today.

Dave Wolf from Cynergy says "[The] entire RIA market just became real and it is about to explode, and it is thanks in large part to Microsoft and Silverlight... Microsoft just justified and legitimized RIA. That is HUGE." I think Dave makes a great point. With a player like Microsoft advocating the agenda, you will see the company's traditional audience of developers and decision makers in enterprises, take RIAs more seriously than they have. This adds to the momentum Adobe (and previously Macromedia) have already garnered. I think with companies like Adobe and Microsoft at the helm, we're at the beginnings of the RIA renaissance.

In that post, Dave also talks about the Microsoft penchant for project code names, but as an insider, I do not see that these names mean that much. Sure they're placeholders on specs, slide decks, share points and distribution list aliases. But that's about it. We laugh when the press and blogosphere influentials weave sinister stories out of these. What matters is action, not name. For clarity, "Sparkle" was never the code name for Silverlight (as some have suggested): it was "Jolt" to the development team and "WPF/E" to everybody else. "Sparkle" was the code name for Expression Blend, the design surface for WPF. I've lost count of the number of times I've chuckled when the tech trade press called Sparkle the Flash-killer. Yeah, like Picasa is the Photoshop killer. Can we please stop with all the killer references?

All of this finally brings me to the core point I'm trying to make in this post. That is: don't believe the hype and the FUD. We're going to announce more details on Silverlight features at the Mix 07 conference. Pick up our next build (coming soon to microsoft.com/silverlight), read the docs, play with the bits and the tools, ask questions on the Silverlight forums, engage with the community and make up your own mind. And do let us know what you think. I'll trade a million articles in tech rags for one post on the forums or your blog where you candidly tell me and the team what we're doing wrong and where you'd like to see us go. Our plans are not set in stone. Silverlight is still pre-release software and there's much we can add and change in this and future versions. My team and I are not looking for toothy grins and thumbs-up signs. We're looking for honest critiques and feature requests. Got any?

PS: I cannot be at Mix 07 this year. I'll be taking it easy that week, but Joe, Vivek, Nick, Mike and others from the team will be on hand to answer questions.

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4 Comments:

  • Personally, I'm very excited about Silverlight. I have worked with RIA technologies in the past, however, they have primarily been designer centric and have been buggy and/or difficult to do simple things like parse an XML document. I'm really excited of Microsoft's commitment to be consistent with the web architecture. I'm really excited about the designer/developer workflow possibilities with the Expression suite. Finally, I'm excited about the features like JavaScript intellisense within Visual Studio "Orcas". When I look at those three things, the Silverlight platform looks all that more impressive.

    By Blogger Chad Campbell, at April 20, 2007 at 5:22 AM  

  • I have some thoughts on Silverlight that I made some time ago on my blog. I would appreciate it if you considered my feedback. Here is the link:
    http://devlicio.us/blogs/rob_eisenberg/archive/2007/01/30/net-3-0-crash-course-part-8-wpf-conclusion.aspx

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at April 20, 2007 at 6:02 AM  

  • Silverlight is a great name, I have high hopes. What I feel despondent about is the reported missing features. It's the parity with WPF that gets me excited. Missing features such as templates and any sort of binding will make porting assets much harder from WPF.

    If not this release (I understand you need to get his out the door) - can you at least confirm this and the mini-CLR for a future date?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at April 20, 2007 at 9:04 AM  

  • Thanks for this posting, it's refreshing to see after all the FUD posts flying back and forth from the two camps.

    I posted a few thoughts on where I'd like to see Silverlight go here.

    When I made that entry I thought the odds of seeing Microsoft open Silverlight were quite low, but after Adobe's open sourcing of Flex yesterday...

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at April 26, 2007 at 10:20 AM  

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