DevConn07 Fall::First million-dollar question about Silverlight

Published 06 November 07 04:35 PM | despos

One of the million-dollar-questions of these days.  

I say that WPF and Silverlight will eventually make ASP.NET and AJAX obsolete. Dino, what do you think about this prediction?

I firmly believe that the two worlds—Web and Windows—will remain neatly separated for most of the foreseeable future.  At the same time, though, the advent of WPF and Silverlight generates many more possibilities of interaction between Web and Windows that were just impossible or impractical before.  Once the next Silverlight is available you can develop for the Web with much of the same ease you experience today for the desktop. You could even get to the point of using the same WPF document to power the Web and Windows front-end of a multi-tier system. Well, not for free, but is definitely a scenario that the use of proper design patterns (i.e., the Model-View-Presenter pattern) may enable. At that point, I believe that you just have two options--deluxe experience with a 100% Silverlight solution or normally rich Web experience with a combination of AJAX and Silverlight in the same ASP.NET page. With Silverlight used in this case as a rendering engine for special data.

To be more direct with the question: For Silverlight and WPF to dethrone ASP.NET and AJAX all developers on all platforms must agree to use it. Technologically speaking, nothing prevents this from happening. In practice, though, I wouldn’t bet on it. But I see a lot of interaction taking place between Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX applications.

And now, let me rush to hear latest news from ScottGu here at DevConnections in Las Vegas.

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Comments

# JK said on November 7, 2007 09:36 PM:

I' am sure when flash came out the designers were thinking the same thing.

When Flex came out developers and designers were thinking the same thing.

Now that, we have WPF and Silverlight all .NET developers are excited and are thinking the same thing.

It will never be 100%, we will always have pure asp.net applications with ajax, and some silverlight here and there.

Not to mention, silverlight will only fly if designers buy into the silverlight/blend idea. Which is very tough for obvious reasons. Developers can only do so much using code and xaml and a average programmer won't sit down and learn a new design tool like blend, only to move a ball from one frame to the other. Also, macromedia will pick up on the fact that they need to have basic input controls in flash and they will add that in, thus closing the gap of differences between flash and silverlight. I' am not saying that silverlight will not fly because of that, but silverlight will not fly for sure, if we think that everyone will be using silverlight or the whole web world will be silverlight and WPF. Everything has its own uses.

WPF as I understand is very very tough to program.

I' am sure when Sun Microsystems come up with a technology similar to flash and silverlight, which has more features and does more things then any of them, the sun community will say something like this.

The only reason we have so much interaction among silverlight and asp.net is because it runs on asp.net and i dont think ajax has anything to do with it. as silverlight is multi threaded when a request is sent to the page.

not to mention there are other advantages to silverlight,

1. developers can now create business applications which designers cannot think of.

and many more....

# Klaus Graefensteiner said on November 9, 2007 12:43 AM:

In my opinion Silverlight is for the developer, what the cell phone is for the goldfish. It is very powerful in some way, but we don't have a clue yet what to do with it.

All the applications that I have seen so far don't add any new value to the user experience. Silverlight makes it actually harder for the user to get the job done, because it is distractive.

I think prettyness should be provided by the web browser.

Klaus

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