I just got back from VSLive Orlando 2007 and have some new insight into Silverlight and the path Microsoft wants to go in the development area. First of all let me say VSLive this year had several things to be commended on and a few short falls as well. At the top was the location and star like treatment we received. The conference was held at the Royal Pacific Resort at Univeral Studios. What a great place! Also, when I read they (meaning the VSLive folks) would provide lunch I had no idea it would be so well done. In short, we were seated and served an incredible meal each day of the conference. One of the highlights of this was that more discussions took place bewtween the other attendees than previously. However this is where the low points came up as well. Unlike last year and other events I have been to, several of the ooh and aahh moments never happened. The problem here was that the technology that was being shown was so far from where most of us developers are right now. Many of us were still working through ASP.Net\AJAX integration, which was last years big ta-da, and now we are walking into a room with some guys acting like it was just a fad or is really out dated now. Normally I would have just thought it was me but I got the same feeling from most everyone I talked to. Not until the last day did we hear a real person view about what developers are going through. Billy Hollis did an incredible job rallying the troops and saying what we were all thinking which was this, when is all of this going to get easier? At what point can we just work on the creative process and not get tied up on the next new thing which seems to come around every year now. Way to go Billy! He also taught some excellent classes on moving to the next generation of development, where UI and simplicity will be the main focus for developers that want to succeed in their field. The focus here being WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight.
Silverlight is actually based greatly on WPF but doesn't support 3-D modeling like the full WPF does. It also has some security restrictions, like Flash, that prevent it from harming the local computer since it is supposed to be hosted in a browser. However, Silverlight does look like a promising replacement for ASP.NET. Yes I said replacement. Now I don't see anyone jumping to move their existing sites over to Silverlight, but for new projects I would certainly recommend looking into it.
WPF has a lot of power for creative UI interaction. I often think of the cool programs that you see hackers or CIA agents on TV using. They have all of these semi-transparent dialog boxes floating all over the screen showing satelite footage, voice analysis, and 3-D blue prints all on one screen with no lag. Well that is where WPF takes us, and very soon if not already, users will come to expect it. So what are we waiting for?
- A good 3-D designer that integrates easily with WPF applications. Expression Blend doesn't support 3-D so you have to break out your geometry books and start editing XAML to make it happen.
- More controls for WPF. Infragistics has realeased a set of controls that do some cool stuff, I look forward to seeing the types of things they come out with.
- Graphics and Video editors\creators working together with programmers. Right now the real creative crowd is using Flash, Photoshop, and Video editors to emulate those cool CIA screens in a fake environment. Getting them to come over to the world of development may take some time.
- Better video cards for typical systems. The integrated 128MB Intel probably won't cut it for medium to high-end WPF apps.
WPF certainly has potential though, just look at Vista. Many of the features you see with the windows use WPF in the shell. I am actually pretty excited about Silverlight and WPF. They both seem pretty raw to me right now but knowing Microsoft they probably already have something in the works to address the drawbacks.