Silverlight and the Year of the Back

Yeah, it's been a while since my last post. Summer is hard here in Italy and makes you terribly lazy. Wives and kids go and leave you alone with a lot of time to spend in pleasant activities such as working overnight and playing tennis during the hottest hours of the day. Until you get injured. Once it is tendinitis; once it is hamstring; once it is the back or the shoulder. For me this has been the year of the back :) 

Getting ready for DevConnections, Las Vegas, Nov 5, I shared some thoughts about Silverlight with DotNetSlackers.com. You can read the full (and brief) story here. But I want to anticipate some of the thoughts.

• Silverlight rocks. But I'm talking about the Silverlight that's not here yet. Ah Ah
• Silverlight 1.0 is just media. Which is way too great. But with the asp:Media control is even better. Unfortunately, the control is in ASP.NET Futures and not usable in real apps
• Silverlight vReal needs layout, input, data binding to start with. Without that is lame.
• A thing like Silverlight may be the formula to make RIA and AJAX apps easier to write.

PS: What? Writing AJAX apps is hard? Was it the hot Italian summer to hit you like this? With partial rendering it takes a moment to ajax-ify virtually any Web... STOP. You said it: partial rendering. On a side note, partial rendering is great but is not AJAX. But I still like (and use) it. But I can't help but repeating that AJAX architectures are hard to achieve without a serious and powerful platform for presentation layer. The pair JS+DOM is too brittle and at high risk of poor performance; pregenerated markup is a trick; Silverlight (or something similar from a non-MS world) may be the answer.

My two final cents of this hot summer. Until next.