Entries Tagged 'silverlight 2.0' ↓

Shawn Wildermuth, theADOguy (who should really rename himself the Silverlight guy) is giving a free seminar at the Microsoft office in Dallas on 2/18. Shawn is a very smart cool guy who knows a lot about a lot, and even more about Silverlight, so this should be a great event, and I'm told he's capping it at 32 seats so "don't say I didn't warn yer."

Pragmatic ADO.NET: Data Access for the Internet World (Microsoft .NET Development Series) by Shawn Wildermuth Read more about this title...

I've received the following question (in various forms) three times in the past two weeks, so I'm going to take the opportunity to post it and my response (such as it is) here.

"... I  read that if Microsoft had supported SVG, this there would have been no need for Silverlight and that Silverlight is just a reinvention of SVG to protect Internet Explorer."

"The blogs say that Silverlight is just SVG reinvented to be owned by Microsoft"

My attempt at a reply usually boils down to something like this...

I never know how to begin to answer questions like this. If Silverlight and SVG were equivalent technologies, this might be a debate that some would benefit from, but I believe they are really quite different, serving different purposes.  Silverlight is an emerging technology in the spectrum of .NET tools for developing applications and I think you'll find that the appeal of Silverlight, strong as it is,  will be an order of magnitude stronger when we unwrap Silverlight 2 in a few weeks.

I don’t mean to dismiss your question; it is just not what I do; I’m best at helping folks learn and use Silverlight, not defending it in comparisons to putative alternative technologies.

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In a great blog listing  today, Tim Sneath discusses Infragistics just released NetAdvantage control set for WPF. In his excellent write up, Tim links to this incredible screenshot from Infragistics of an app that they "very quickly" build with WPF and their controls

Yowza!

This is great news, but being a total Silverlight Geek, I was immediately jealous: hey, where's ours? 

<slap!> One company, one team.  <slap!>

Yeah, but awww....

Well, <whew> I was glad to see that Infragistics is on on the case!  Turns out that they are already building some prerelease 2.0 control prototypes, including this cool gauge,

I'll try to give some exposure to other companies that are also working on control sets for Silverlight 2.0 from time to time.  There are a lot of exciting things cooking.

<corny>

Could be!
Who knows?
There's something due any day;
I will know right away,
Soon as it shows...

Could it be? Yes, it could.
Something's coming, something good,
If I can wait!
Something's coming, I don't know what it is,
But it is
Gonna be great!

lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
© 1956, 1957 Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed.
Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, Publisher.

</corny>

I just wanted to clarify something that is hopefully already pretty well understood. As folk know, we released an alpha of Silverlight 1.1 at MIX, and there are lots of people who would love to use it even in its current form. It's great to see the excitement around using .NET for web development, of course, but Silverlight 1.1 (now known as 2.0) is not ready for "Go Live" usage at this stage, and the EULA explicitly prohibits deployment in production sites.

Why is this? Primarily it's because the currently-available 1.1 bits were produced very early in the development milestone, and they are not being actively serviced. If you have Silverlight 1.1 on your machine, the latest version you are likely to have is 1.1.20926.0 (where the last four digits of the build number indicate that this build was compiled on 09/26, i.e. September 26th). We actually shipped a maintenance release a couple of weeks ago for 1.0 (build 1.0.21115.0), but we're not attempting to keep the 1.1 alpha build in sync with this. (Hey, it's a developer preview build!)

The net impact of that is that if you have the 1.1 alpha on your machine, you may find that some 1.0 sites won't load successfully on your machine (in their manifest, they may require the maintenance release as a minimum build number). This shouldn't be an issue for any consumer in the "real world" - it's purely something that will affect a developer who is living at the bleeding edge by installing alpha software on their machines.

And that’s why we’re not clearing 1.1 for "Go Live" / production usage at this stage – we don’t want it to be broadly deployed. It's not fair for us or anyone else to inflict alpha-quality software on their customer base to view a website! We'll have a solution here by MIX, but I hope this explains the intent behind the current licensing.