Introducing Silverlight 2

Frank La Vigne Applied Information Sciences Tablet PC MVP www.franksworld.com [email_address]

Silverlight: Where We Are Now

Uses XAML

Runs on Window, Mac and Linux

Silverlight Mobile coming later this year

Version 1.0 is released

1.1 has been rolled up into version 2

Abundance of breaking changes

Version 2 is currently in Beta

RTM later this year

Versions of Silverlight

1.0

Uses Javascript for interactivity

Supports High Def Streaming

2.0

Uses .NET for interactivity

Has a scaled down CLR

Called AG CLR (AG = Silver)

Runtime of about 4.5 mb

Supports High Def Streaming

Javascript Gets No Respect

Many enterprise & component developers ignored version 1 in favor of version 2.

Many firms simply did not want to add more Javascript code to their maintenance load.

The Silverlight 1.0 Blues

Silverlight Didn’t Come Out in the 80s

How Did We Get Here?

Evolution of UX –Text Based UI

User Experience

Usability – Low

Flexibility – Low

Engagement – None

Performance – Excellent

Development Experience

Reasonable skillset

Clunky editors and debuggers early on

No Choice

Deployment Experience

Easy

Era: Mainframe to DOS

Evolution of UX – Desktop GUI

User Experience

Usability – High

Flexibility – High

Engagement – Medium

Performance – Very Good

Good tools, platforms, languages

Generally needed only two languages: VB/C# and SQL

Very Difficult at first

Easier with .NET

Era: Windows 3.1 to Present

Evolution of UX – Web Based UI

User Experience

Usability – Medium/Low

Flexibility – Medium

Engagement – High

Performance – Poor-Good

High Effort, High Cost

Cross Browser Problems

Multiple Languages: VB/C#, JavaScript, xml, xsl, SQL, HTML, CSS

Debugging Difficult

Easy

Era: Internet era to Present

Evolution of UX – RIA

User Experience

Usability – High

Flexibility – TBD

Engagement – High

Performance – Good to Excellent

Good tools, platforms, languages

Generally need only: VB/C#, XAML and SQL

Easy, via browser

Silverlight

Click-once for WPF

Era: Flash v1 to Present

The Competition

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have been around for a while.

For past ten years, Flash has dominated the market

Adobe Flex is an IDE built on top of Flash with J2EE & JSP

Sun recently introduced JavaFX

RIA in Depth

RIA brings the best of desktop and client/server applications to the best of web applications

Deployment via web

Enhanced user experience

Microsoft RIA (WPF and Silverlight)

One skillset, language, and toolset, from the database to the services and sites, through to the client, in the browser or on the desktop

soon, add phone and mobile devices to the list

What’s New in Silverlight 2?

Controls & Layout

Actual controls you expected to see in 1.0

WPF style skinning and styling

Data Binding

WPF style data binding

Framework Changes

No more Javascript!

Managed Code

Dynamic Language Runtime

Isolated Storage

What’s New in Silverlight 2? (cont’d)

Client Networking Stack

WCF based

Sockets

Cross-Domain Communications

New Packaging & Deployment Model

XAP files

Customizable splash screens

Deep Zoom / Multi-Scale Image

Sea Dragon technology

More!

LINQ, Localization, Fonts and much, much more

What’s New in Silverlight 2

Deep Zoom/Multi-Scale Image

Based on Sea Dragon technology

Uses tiled image pyramids

Theoretical max of 4 billion square pixels

In real terms, a screen 500 miles wide

Image size overhead is about 40%

Deep Zoom Image Composer handles of all this for you

Deep Zoom Start to Finish

Networking

WCF Based Networking Stack

Cross Domain calls allowed

But the target site has to allow it

Twitter, oddly enough, lacks the cross domain policy

HTTP/HTTPS

Sockets

Proxy Web Page

Silverlight Client Access Policy

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<access-policy>

<cross-domain-access>

<policy>

<allow-from>

<domain uri=" * " />

</allow-from>

<grant-to>

<resource path=" / " include-subpaths=" true " />

</grant-to>

</policy>

</cross-domain-access>

</access-policy>

http://www.franksworld.com/clientaccesspolicy.xml

Flash Cross Domain Policy <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross- domain-policy.dtd"> <cross-domain-policy> <allow-access-from domain="*" /> </cross-domain-policy> http://www.franksworld.com/crossdomain.xml