Silverlight 2.0

Ok, so I went to my first Dev Conference on Thursday night. I was invited by a guy named Paul and you can see his blog here. It was in the Microsoft office in Islin, NJ which is seriously like ½ mile from my office where I just so happened to be on Thursday (I usually work out of my home). So, anyway, I went there and got there early and felt a little weird so I pretended to be busy on my iPhone. A friend of mine told me that a lot of the girls that go to these things are recruiters. I tried to look as technical as possible and as uninterested in hiring people as I could. I can’t forget to mention there was free pizza.

 

So, anyway, let’s talk about Silverlight 2.0. Before the conference I heard it described as “Microsoft’s answer to Flash.” That made me wonder why so many developers were interested, but I got it after the “seminar?” It’s Microsoft Flash ++, ++++++. So, the guy (I think his name was Justin? If it wasn’t it is now), so Justin started talking about the History of JavaScript and web design trending (hmmm… where have we heard that before?). Showed us some old crap and made us chuckle. He then proceeded to start telling us about Silverlight 1.0.  Now 1.0 didn’t wow me. I mean it was pretty cool, introduced a super HTML called XAML… kind of like AJAX it just worked with some special easily manipulated async controls. It allowed any type of media to be embedded *yawn*. This was cool, but as I’m not too interested in streaming media (at least when it comes to development, when it comes to hogging bandwidth rock on, brother) it wasn’t super awesome. You have to remember that Silverlight is a little painful because like ActiveX or Java or Flash you have to download it the first time you use it. Yuck.

 

We worked a little in Expression Blend (which I downloaded and never played with)…. I do like the Expression Suite because of the marriage it makes btw developers and designers…. But that’s just about it. The greys and blacks make me want to seize….. that’s about as far as I hope to get with it. ANYWAY, I got to see a lot of things familiar to flash and the Macromedia suite. We made some videos dance. I mean, the fact that you can put videos in buttons, eeeeh, neat.

 

So, the real fun came when we started looking at Silverlight 2.0. Now, hold on, are you ready for this? I don't think you are, take a breath. There is a built in browser CLR compiler. I’m going to let that sink in for a second. You do know what that means, don’t you? CLIENT SIDE C# THAT’S WHAT THAT MEANS. How cool is that? Gone are the days when I am saying “damn it, how the heck am I going to do this is JS it would be so much easier to do it in C# (oh yeah, VB.NET too). Imagine all you can do with a little cached data? We’re talking postbacks are history…. Basically…. I mean, we just will be using them a lot less.

 

Also, imagine the functionality you can add to videos with this stuff. We got to see some sites like HSN.com where there was live streaming TV that you could manipulate and change like no other website (or tivo, for that matter) could.

 

So, all in all a great experience, I got to meet some other developers. I’m really excited about the Silverlight thing too. I hope I will have access to it during my redesign. My company gives me access to a lot of Microsoft Products. So, maybe it will be on the server by then.

 

Join us next week when we talk about “Computer Kharma: Fact or Fiction?” and my ongoing work as well as my coming Vista/VS 2008 switch.