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Tech Focus
Silverlight 2.0: The Wait Is Almost Over
2/21/2008
The first public beta of Silverlight 2.0 is expected from Microsoft in the next few weeks. By all accounts, those that have seen the private beta report that the features outlined by the General Manager of Microsoft's Developer Division, Scott Guthrie, in a November blog posting are pretty much on track.
Silverlight 2.0 will provide a subset of the .NET Framework and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) so that developers and designers can build rich Internet applications (RIAs). Silverlight 1.0, which shipped in September, is primarily a media player for video and other content that uses a JavaScript programming model.
The first public beta of Silverlight 2.0 (renamed from 1.1) is expected to drop close to the start of the MIX08 conference, Microsoft's Web development event that's planned to run in Las Vegas from March 5 to 13. Silverlight was introduced for the first time at MIX07.
This year, the big guns--chief executive Steve Ballmer, chief architect Ray Ozzie, and Scott Guthrie--are planning to make keynote appearances as Microsoft delivers a slew of new technologies: Silverlight 2.0 with Visual Studio (VS) 2008 tooling support, a refresh of the ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) Framework with its first VS 2008 tooling, and new APIs for the Windows Live Platform, among other goodies for developers.
As expected, many companies will show demos of unique uses of Silverlight 2.0 at MIX08. Infragistics Inc. will present a demo that integrates Silverlight 2.0 charts and gauges with sample data (Northwind) and Windows Live services, according to Dean Guida, the company's chief executive officer. He said there's a lot of excitement around the technology, but it's still a ways off. His company expects to release Silverlight 2.0 components 60 days after the final version is released, hopefully before the end of the year.
WPF's Little Brother
"The expectation is that Silverlight is going to follow something close to the page model in WPF, which is not the same as the Web page model or the Windows model," said Rockford Lhotka, Microsoft MVP and principal technology evangelist for consultancy Magenic Technologies Inc.
In fact, Silverlight 2.0 is a lot closer to WPF than many people think, asserted Guthrie, who described the technology as a compatible subset of both .NET and WFP in a recent Channel9 video.
"Everything that we've added is designed to be system.namespace-compatible with .NET," he said.
That includes the subset of the Common Language Runtime, core base class library, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), the networking stack, and the XML stack. Unlike JavaScript, Silverlight version 2.0 supports cross-domain network access, which allows an app to callback to servers other than the one from which it was downloaded.
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