Is Silverlight 3 Ready for Business? -- Visual Studio Magazine

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Is Silverlight 3 Ready for Business?

Microsoft is expected to launch Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3 at an event in the San Francisco Bay Area this Friday. I lived on Russian Hill for four glorious years in the early '90s and I can definitely relate to Jack London's description of his youth in this magnificent city:

"You look back and see how hard you worked and how poor you were, and how desperately anxious you were to succeed, and all you can remember is how happy you were."

As developers "see the light" for the third time and welcome Scott Guthrie and S. "Soma" Somasegar to the Bay Area, it's apropos that the latest version of the technology is officially released in the Paris of the West.

Silverlight 3 finally delivers the goods for enterprise app developers, according to many people who are familiar with the technology. While business applications can be built in Silverlight 2, many developers were still, in effect, rolling their own apps as they dealt with issues such as one-off styles that required repeating a lot of code, observed Tony Lombardo, Microsoft MVP and Infragistics' lead evangelist. "Silverlight 3 allows developers to focus on the business logic layer...and not all the little pieces," he said. "You don't have to write as much code."

Among its new features, Silverlight 3 adds style inheritance through XAML element databinding, which binds properties so that changes are made across elements. It also offers built-in animation-easing functions (BackEase, BounceEase, CircleEase and many more), the ability to simulate 3-D with XAML, Pixel Shaders similar to those found in WPF, and GPU support. You can follow the latest Silverlight and Expression Blend developments on the team blog here.

The out-of-browser support in Silverlight 3 is expected to attract LOB developers. "In the past, developers looked at XBAP deployment or XAML browser application of a WPF app and that blurred the line between 'Is this a Windows client application or is this a Web application?'" Lombardo said. "But that was more about deployment.

"Now, with Silverlight out-of-browser, you are getting a very similar-type blur and that is going to continue to happen. That is a big benefit for a lot of these companies that are investing in Web technologies and want the zero deployment factor of being able to just put an application up and everybody can use it without having to worry about running these installers and doing all the other tasks associated with that."

Microsoft is working hard to make Silverlight 3 the technology of choice for enterprise developers. Is Silverlight 3 a complete platform or are there still areas that Microsoft needs to work on? Express your thoughts on the Web below or drop me a line at krichards@reddevnews.com.

Posted by Kathleen Richards on 07/07/2009 at 11:05 AM

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Reader Comments:

Wed, Jul 8, 2009 Paul Minneapolis, MN

I agree that Silverlight is coming along nicely, however it is still a work-in-progress. I'm designing a global SL 3 app that talks to several back-end systems. Items still needed: print and webcam/audio support, being able to set starting paths for the file dialogs. SL's security sandbox needs to provide for intranet zones if we are to be building business apps. I'm incorporating Telerik's SL controls to satisfy requirements such as right-click menus, a 'real' grid, a rich text control, etc.

Wed, Jul 8, 2009 Len KSC

Silverlight 3 is pretty solid, I would like to see the Combo Box fixed for the DataGrid ( you should be able to use an index in one table to display a value from another). Cut and paste from a data grid or straight export to an Excel spreadsheet would be nice and printer support. I am looking for these in the next release, and of course a Go Live license.

Wed, Jul 8, 2009 Michael Philippines

I guess a support for webcam and audio devices will be great for preventing the use of both flash and silverlight in some web application. With all 3 part provider like Telerik, Infragistic, component art it become even more easy to build quickly reporting app or complex ria UI. I look fwd for a stable silverlight 3 version, and first with audio/webcam support.

Wed, Jul 8, 2009 XAML Templates

Hi, look at http://www.xamltemplates.net/sl/ you can see a complete theme for all the Silverlight controls.

Tue, Jul 7, 2009 Dharmindar Devsidas

Not having transaction support and being restricted into the internet security zone we can not utilize silverlight for Enterprise apps. It is still too far from WPF. Silverlight should improve with WCF binding support. Though it is a consideration of security what I know is that any unmanaged code can easily screw up the managed code access security. These all are the bits and pieces of dirt that are yet to be washed.

Tue, Jul 7, 2009 Sam

Marc, Silverlight supports Right click. You have to code it up a bit. Research online. Rich text support with hyperlinks is something they should have come up in Version 2 itself.

Tue, Jul 7, 2009 Gary Gluckman

I would love to see stronger 3D support. In its current state, the 3D components are seriously lacking.

Tue, Jul 7, 2009 Francois Picanza Montreal, QC, Canada

I think Silverlight is coming along quite nicely. There are of course items to tidy up it could use stronger documentation on known pitfalls/roadblocks (i.e. what can and cannot be done in low-trust, how to get used to asynch programming, easy debugging guidelines,...) but if I was to name the one item that hurts is the lack of a built-in reporting reprocess even if only to generate an on-screen PDF on which the user would have the take the action to save to file or to send to print. But I still love Silverlight in its current state.

Tue, Jul 7, 2009 Marc Beaverton, OR

There are many things still missing, as http://silverlight.net/forums/p/44499/243727.aspx#243727 illustrates. I'd love to see (1) rich text (including hyperlinks); (2) right (or long) click to get a context menu; (3) print support.