Is the world ready for Silverlight?

Microsoft's new wonder product Silverlight looks set to take the web by storm - at some point. But when will we be able to start rolling out websites making use of it?

The software is ready for us - with the launch of Silverlight 2 designers and developers on the .NET Framework can work effectively in producing stunning looking websites and applications - but until user's browsers have Silverlight installed we're all going to continue to hold off using it in any significant way.

I spotted a recent optional Microsoft Update included the product which will boost the usage and Silverlight comes with a really nice 'install now' option, which works quickly. But do you want to be the one that does it (potentially scaring off users)?

Flash has always had the same issue and there was no stopping development of websites using flash in part, if not entirely. But we're all much more sophisticated now. As users, we know we don't want to install things. We can't trust websites that need to install plug-ins, can we? It will inevitably be a major part of the web in the future. However for now, I think we have to restrict our use to it playing a bit-part role online and allowing ourselves to use it more widely in more controlled environments (such as Intranets).

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Back to the future

Progress is, by definition, a positive thing. But isn't it frustrating when you then have to go back and work on something older again. Then you realise just how far you've come.

I've recently been working on a site developed in .NET 2.0 - we've come all the way now to 3.5 (which in fact is deceptively only actually one version up) but the differences in some tasks are incredible.

I set out to create an entirely custom paging User Control for a .NET 2.0 datagrid - seemed like a simple idea at the time - but the datagrid in question was a pretty complex one, and the ASP.NET Page Cycle threw in a few curve balls! And I wanted a control that could be applied to any datagrid. This proved to be a great deal more difficult than I expected. Perhaps my expectations were biased by the ease of achieving this with the new ASP 3.5 ListView (as previously hyped up by me). It ended up taking a good four-five hours. The good news is, it is now, rock solid, is totally reusable and can be applied to every scenario that I can imagine.

Next time, hopefully the client in question will have access to .NET 3.5 though!

ASP.NET / VB.NET developer

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Silverlight on it's way

A little late on the posting, but just had a look though Scott Gu's blog about Silverlight 2.0... Really looking forward to seeing this in action (and ready for us .NET developers to use)!

Scott Gu Looking forward to Silverlight 2.0