Microsoft’s new ‘Flash-killer’ called Silverlight was launched at Mix07 last week in a blaze of demo-glory!
I asked Microsoft’s Silverlight project manager, Brad Abrams, to do an interview here on Podleaders to discuss Silverlight and he readily agreed. I’ll be interviewing Brad this coming Monday (May 14th).
So, if you have any questions you’d like me to put to Brad during the interview, please feel free to leave them in the comments of this post.
Exciting times for Microsoft I’m sure and thanks for your time.
Couple questions.
1. I am a web-developer and I use Mac OS X. What Mac OS X tools can I use to develop Silverlight content? Can I use a good text-editor like Textmate or must I buy into the Visual Studio or Expression range which will have to run under Parallels or Bootcamp? (I used to do ASP.NET and have used Visual Studio since 1.0 days.)
2. The DLR really floats my boat, theoretically. I use Ruby these days and do too much JavaScript than is good for me. How practical will it be to dump JavaScript and use Ruby against the HTML DOM from within Silverlight? Failing that will I be able to use Silverlight as an interpreter for JavaScript running against the HTML DOM? Current browsers are terribly slow and simply being able to put my JavaScript in a hidden Silverlight control would be fantastic.
3. Does this mean I can go back to calling WPF, Avalon? Please? Silverlight gives me a bit of hope MS realises the… severity… of its recent naming decisions.
Thanks.
Hi Brad,
The ostensible goal of Silverlight is to give developers of web applications a better experience. However, it seems to me that it will end up making the net experience of actual web *users* worse. I’ve already talked to you a bit about the usability problems of allowing developers to create textboxes, links, scrollbars and other controls within Silverlight which don’t act in quite the same way that their browser counterparts do. Silverlight will also break the user conception of the back button, just as Flash notoriously does. I’ve also mentioned the important benefits of keeping the View Source command mandatory - better transparency of what code is doing on your machine; hackability leading to more innovation; keeping web development inclusive.
In light of these concerns, can you tell us a bit about the process of designing Silverlight?
Did you do any user testing on Flash-based sites to see where the problems with those lie?
Did you consider releasing just the DLR part of Silverlight, allowing people to script the DOM with a other languages than Javascript, but leaving out the heavyweight presentation framework?
Most importantly, can you say what advantages Microsoft saw in going this route over embracing the web as it is and making the developer experience for that better instead? (I’m not saying we don’t need HD video and good vector APIs on the web, thats a separate question and you know exactly what I’d say to that)
Sorry for the massive question Tom!
Rowan
Hi,
I have a few questions that I’ve posted here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jmandia/archive/2007/05/07/Points-of-interest-_2300_6.aspx
In summary the questions are:
1) From a business perspective reach is one of the highest things to consider. With that in mind why are you not supporting earlier versions of windows that support internet explorer 6 (yes, the ideal is that everyone would use xp or vista but there are still lots of people using older versions of windows globally)?
2) Will Microsoft aid the Mono team who are looking to build a plugin for silverlight that runs on linux?
3) Is Microsoft considering search engine optimisation (again another business concern, if you build your application predominantly in Silverlight you want it to still be indexed by the main search engines otherwise you’ll lose your potential audience)?
4) Microsoft are looking at adding Silverlight support to mobile devices. Will this be restricted to windows devices?
Thanks,
John
John M, excellent question and statement. A DLR-only control with DOM linkage would be something really useful.
Hi Brad,
I have the following questions:
1. Are there plans to add different layout elements - like the ones that are available in WPF like
- Grid,
- StackPanel,
- WrapPanel or
- DockPanel
And if there are - would they be available in the final 1.1 version? What else could we expect from the WPF world to be available in Silverlight?
2. Are there plans to implement an analog of the html “contenteditable” attribute and what will be the support for rich text.
More precisely my question is will we be able to implement WYSIWYG editor in a Silverlight app?
3. What controls are expected to be shipped with the final 1.1 version?
And one last question - since Microsoft recently released the 1.0 version of the ASP.NET Ajax framework - how do you think this framework will be developed from now on, having in mind all the cool features that the Silverlight brings to the web. In what app scenarios the both frameworks will be used? Do you think they will cooperate each other or the release of Silverlight will replace the ASP.NET Ajax framework.
Thanks!