- Posted by christhi on November 18, 2008
SilverLight is generating a ton of momemtum recently and when I first heard that 1 in 4 computers now has SilverLight installed I was blown away. I knew it would eventually happend but I had no idea it would reach this level so quickly. In my day to day dealings with custom development shops, design agencies, and customers I'm hearing the same thing over and over again that is "we are beginning to look seriously at SilverLight as an option" and not just for video. SilverLight 1 was sort of touted as the "Video" release as building full fledged LOB business applications or RIA were more challenging given the lack of .NET code behind. Now with SilverLight shipping last month that changed and it has changed in a big way. Not only can you develop SilverLight 2 applications with .NET code behind but with the release of SP1 for Expression Blend it is now easier than ever to do so. You have advanced controls such a datagrid and calendars as well as a myriad of other controls being release in the form of toolkits distributed as open source. Check out SilverLight 2 Toolkit at http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight, there you can find a charting control, expander, auto complete box, and treeview to name a few and the list keeps growing.
The SilverLight wave is also directly aimed at providing pure line of business frameworks and samples with the likes of Prism 2.0 (www.codeplex.com/prism) for building composite applications in SilverLight (as well as WPF), and vertically targeted LOB samples such as our Microsoft Common UI for Healtcare which you can also download from codeplex (www.mscui.com to run the demos) and (http://www.codeplex.com/mscui) to download the code samples and source code.
SilverLight is also being deployed at an incredible rate within the firewall at our enterprise customers with Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update so we can deploy SilverLight on the desktops in a seemless fashion.
Aside from the competive advantage of enabling better developer/designer workflow, SilverLight 2 provides other unique features such as support for "adaptive streaming". Adaptive streaming will be integrated as part of IIS7 and "Smooth Streaming" (HD quality video over the web) that will enable video to be delivered at multiple bit rates up to 2.5Mbits. You may have witnessed our adaptive streaming technology when watching the Olympics on msnbc.com which served over 3500 hours of live and on-demand action to over 60 million unique visitors this summer and that was only at a max 1.5 Mbits bitrates imagine with 2.5Mbits will offer.
The net of it is that my customers and partners are taking SilverLight seriously today with v2 and are having tremendous success doing it such as the recent announcement of BlockBuster replacing Flash with SilverLight for its MovieLink application or NetFlix with its instant watch service. I am very much looking forward to what lies ahead in SilverLight 3 (which I will be writing about next).