Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 rocks
I’ve tried to get excited about Silverlight, particularly when I found Silverlight stickers laying around at Mix on Campus and took one for my laptop.
Silverlight 1.0 sucked (this is in my opinion) because it was Javascript – ew ew ew. It was essentially an interesting graphic engine with some pretty good video (/streaming) tech. The killer here was Javascript – if I’m going to use a Microsoft technology, I damn well want to use C#, or another .NET language I’m already using.
Silverlight 1.1 was better in that it used .NET, but it sucked because if you wanted to do anything, you had to build all the controls (such as buttons, or listboxes, etc) yourself. NOT FUN AT ALL. While yes, Silverlight 1.1 was renamed 2.0, I’m referring to the 1.1 Alpha September Refresh.
Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1, now ships with most of the standard “WPF” controls (or controls very close to them anyway), meaning it requires very little effort to go from a WPF application to Silverlight 2 application – that’s cool (and check them out on the samples page). And it can communicate with SOAP(Limited? v1.1 BP I believe)/XML services rather well, I’ve got a WSDL thing going on – that’s cool. Oh, LINQ too? Local storage? What about Deep Zoom from Photosynth (when can we get that for WPF?!) which is capable of handling (from various sources) Petabytes (1024 Terrabytes) of data? Oh yeah, Silverlight 2 is really starting to live up to the codename “WPF/E”!
I was toying with a WPF application yesterday, that I wanted to have online, and sure enough, I could copy the majority of the codebehind and UI, so very cool!
Silverlight 2 is much more exciting, a nice example of a few of the new technologies included in it can be found at the Hard Rock Memorabilia app.