PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast

Episode 55 of the PodLeaders show - 43 mins 35 secs

My guest on the show this week is Brad Abrams. Brad is the Group Program Manager for Microsoft’s dotNet Framework. Brad is heavily involved in the development of SilverLight.

I invited Brad to come on the show to tell me a little about Silverlight and as usual I invited reader/listener questions as well.

Here are the questions I asked Brad and the times I asked them:

Can you give us a bit of background on how you got into Microsoft first day and then progressed onto Group Program Manager? - 00:24

Hang on, you were responsible for Windows 98? - 02:08

And you have since gone into the dotNet side of things? - 02:37

Tell me about SilverLight, what exactly is it? - 03:16

There were three aspects to the SilverLight announcement at Mix: the plugin, the ability to code for SilverLight using Expression Studio and Visual Studio; and SilverLight Streaming… - 05:01

I had a quick look at the Silverlight Streaming application and I didn’t see an uploader, is that something which is being built, or did I just miss it? - 08:09

Is it limited to specific file formats? - 08:43

Audience Questions

Paul M. Watson
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.) - 09:38

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. - 11:09

Rowan Nairn
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? - 16:45

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? - 22:55

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) - 24:47

John M
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)? - 27:15

2) Will Microsoft aid the Mono team who are looking to build a plugin for silverlight that runs on linux? - 28:42

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)? - 29:25

4) Microsoft are looking at adding Silverlight support to mobile devices. Will this be restricted to windows devices? - 32:17

Valentin Stoychev

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? - 33:15

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? - 34:34

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. - 36:42

In what app scenarios the both frameworks will be used? 38:36

Do you think they will cooperate each other or the release of Silverlight will replace the ASP.NET Ajax framework. - 39:47

Finally, 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. - 42:20

Here is a blog post of Brad’s where he links to SilverLight useful resources including his talk at Mix07

Download the entire interview here
(20mb mp3)