DeveloperZen.com - Silverlight

Nokia just announced its intentions on bringing Microsoft's Silverlight to its mobile phones:

Nokia to bring Microsoft Silverlight powered experiences to millions of mobile users
March 04, 2008

Extends choice for developers on the world's leading mobile platforms

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world's leading smartphone software(1), as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.  Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way.

"Today's consumers are very clear in what they want: easy access to tightly integrated services and data on any device," said Lee Williams, Senior Vice President in Nokia's Devices software organization. "Nokia's software strategy is based on cross-platform development environments, enabling the creation of rich applications across the Nokia device range.  Nokia aims to support market leading and content rich internet application environments and to embrace and encourage open innovation. By working with Microsoft, we are creating terrific opportunities and additional choices for the development community, S60 licensees and the industry as a whole."

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications.  Silverlight is already powering thousands of applications around the world and organizations including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal to deliver superior Web-based experiences to their customers.  The arrangement with Nokia will substantially extend the reach of Silverlight by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices, including S60 on Symbian smartphones from a range of manufacturers, as well as Nokia Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

"This is an important relationship on so many levels. Working with Nokia means we are easily able to reach a huge number of mobile users, including customers of all S60 licensees.  This is a significant step in gaining broad acceptance for Silverlight and ensuring it is platform agnostic. This is critical since we want to make sure developers and designers don't have to constantly recreate the wheel and build different versions of applications and services for multiple operating systems, browsers and platforms," said S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division.

"There is clear market demand for rich, Web-based services across a variety of device types, but developing these can often be commercially difficult. For Microsoft this extends Silverlight to a broader range of vendors, platforms and devices.  For Nokia it expands the web runtime options on its devices, enabling a wider community of developers and more applications. This should help the  uptake of higher speed mobile services and advance a new era of anytime, anywhere device-based computing", said Bola Rotibi , Principal Analyst at Ovum.

Microsoft will demonstrate Silverlight on S60 during the opening keynote at Microsoft's MIX08 conference on March 5 in Las Vegas. Silverlight is intended to be available to S60 developers later this year with initial service delivery anticipated shortly thereafter for all S60 licensees.   This will allow S60 application developers to use an even wider range of development environments for S60 on Symbian OS than today. Today S60 developers can use: C++ (using native Symbian OS APIs and Open C providing subset of standard POSIX libraries), S60 Web Run-time (supporting standards-based web technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML), the Java(TM) language, Flash Lite from Adobe, and Python.

I wonder if this is Silverlight 2.0 they're talking about. Will we have a CoreCLR running on Symbian OS?

• Silverlight is pretty cool for doing interactive web apps.
  • I think they concentrated on Video too much on version one and I would have wanted the features in Silverlight 2.0 (WPF controls etc.) in 1.0 and video added later on. Comm'on, how many of us really set on developing another YouTube clone?
  • Leverages developers .NET and WPF knowledge for web apps. This is what I like most about Microsoft's offering they have one basic platform that requires one set of basic skills which can later be applied to multiple platforms and kinds of applications.
• I hate the fact Silverlight 1.0 works with JavaScript codebehind.
• I hate JavaScript...

I think the most interesting session was Adam Kinney's, who demonstrated the development process of his XBox Live! silverlight gadget. After getting some gamer tags from the audience and realizing that all would probably be offline as they're in the event, one person had a "1 minute ago"... hmm...

And for other notes, as in any Microsoft event they have giveaways:

• I missed the Silverlight T-Shirts giveaway at the beginning of the event and when I came to the organizers later they sadly said that they  only have Small size shirts left. If you haven't shopped for clothes in the US, size Small is pretty much like Large... and they usually don't have Small... I was expecting an XXL size shirt and got a small which is just my size so I'm happy :)
• Microsoft Research were giving out cool bags for filling a form. By the time I filled the form they were out of bags and I got a "Microsoft Research" rubber ball :\
• I almost got a book at one of the lectures
• As usual, I didn't win anything at the raffles (I never get lucky in raffles)

When I was leaving the Silverlight event there was some Zune marketing\analysts\team\?? meeting in the next room.
Microsoft are planning a PR effort on Zune for Mother's day and Christmas focusing on the wifi capabilities which are Zune's differentiator.

Not convinced. But to be fare, I don't really like the new iPod video or the shuffle... Nothing like my good old iPod Shuffle.

Scott Guthrie just published a comprehensive post detailing Microsoft's .NET web products roadmap.
To sum up the release schedule:

• .NET Framework Source Code - No date specified in the post but should be any time now.
• ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions - Preview version will be available next week
• Silverlight 2.0 - Public beta on Q1 2008 (With Go-Live licence)
• IIS 7 - Will be part of the Windows 2008 release. The official launch is at February 27th 2008 so it'll probably RTM before that.

I'm extremely happy to see Silverlight maturing as a web development platform with its 2.0 version that includes:

• WPF UI Framework: The current Silverlight Alpha release only includes basic controls support and a managed API for UI drawing.  The next public Silverlight preview will add support for the higher level features of the WPF UI framework.  These include: the extensible control framework model, layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, and control template and skinning support.  The WPF UI Framework features in Silverlight will be a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in last week's .NET Framework 3.5 release.

• Rich Controls: Silverlight will deliver a rich set of controls that make building Rich Internet Applications much easier.  The next Silverlight preview release will add support for core form controls (textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc), built-in layout management controls (StackPanel, Grid, etc), common functionality controls (TabControl, Slider, ScrollViewer, ProgressBar, etc) and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, etc).

• Rich Networking Support: Silverlight will deliver rich networking support.  The next Silverlight preview release will add support for REST, POX, RSS, and WS* communication.  It will also add support for cross domain network access (so that Silverlight clients can access resources and data from any trusted source on the web).

• Rich Base Class Library Support: Silverlight will include a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc).  The next Silverlight preview release will also add built-in support for LINQ to XML and richer HTML DOM API integration.

When evaluating Silverlight (1.0 and 1.1) a few month ago I came to a conclusion that its not mature enough for us to use it for building business UIs. Having support for only vector graphic shapes meant that any control had to be built manually which means we would have had to manually build a lot of controls ourselves.

With the new support for WPF UI Framework and Rich Controls it now seems more robust for building LOB applications.

Some ideas regarding Silverlight in LOB apps:

1. Embed Silverlight in InfoPath. InfoPath forms only support a limited set of controls and since its driven by IE it could be extended by embedding ActiveX controls. If you want rich graphics, animations, graphs, etc. as part of your form you have to embed some sort of an ActiveX.
   Of course, you can always develop you're own ActiveX and embed a WinForm or WPF inside InfoPath but why go through all that work when Microsoft already implemented Silverlight ActivX for you?
2. Outlook folder Homepage. Folder homepages in Outlook are htmls. To display rich UI in that view the only (hacky) way (presented by Microsoft as part pf project Elixir on MSDN) is to embed an ActiveX in that html and have it connect with an Outlook addin via .NET remoting. Silverlight can be used to save the work and effort on developing (and deploying) your own ActiveX.

I guess we'll have to re-evaluate Silverlight when the 2.0 beta comes out...

On other notes, I'm at Redmond right now attending the Silverlight 1.0 Firestarter event which should be interesting...

In the Seattle area on November 29 and looking for something to do? Why not join a Silverlight workshop at Microsoft Redmond?

On November 29, 2007 Microsoft will be hosting Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter on the Redmond, Washington campus. This daylong event is free to anyone who wants to learn about designing and developing with Microsoft Silverlight 1.0.  

Don't worry, if you can't be there in person, I am told we are going to make all the material available on line after the event..

Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 is a cross platform browser plug-in that enables for easy development of media rich web sites.  For more information, visit http://silverlight.net.

November 29, 2007
Microsoft Redmond Campus
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA
Building 33, Kodiak Room
** Please have a photo ID with you to register onsite and park

Check-in: 8:00 am
Event: 8:30 am – 5:00 pm
Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032359153&Culture=en-US
or by calling 1-877-673-8368 and referencing Event ID 1032359153

Check out the Facebook event page at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=14189895595

I'm definitely going to try and make it...

(via Brad Adams's blog)

Just came across this new WPF\Silverlight site - nibbles: snack tutorials for hungry designers.
As described on the site:

As the name suggests, nibbles are short tutorials that teach you one specific feature at a time. Later, you can combine all the things you have learned to develop a complex project by yourself.

There are already some tutorials about Expression Blend and Silverlight and content on Blend with WPF is expected soon. You can watch for new releases on the nibbles blog.

I just got my Popfly invitation and created my first mashup - a Carousel displaying photos from my Flickr account (here's a preview screenshot if you don't have Silverlight installed).

You can check out the full page here or you can even download it as a Gadget :)
This is how it looks at design time:

Currently I haven't seen anything more complicated built with Popfly. Yet, its only in its Alpha stage...
This calls for some more research...