On Tuesday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates focused one of his final keynotes as Chairman of the Microsoft Corporation on Software Developers. Gate’s took the time to remind everyone that the common link between everything Microsoft has ever built was software development tools. One of his major announcements and focal points in his keynote revolved around Silverlight.
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Coming This Week
From stability, to new features like LINQ (Language Integrated Query), to some new controls, Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is going to really make a lot of Silverlight developers happy! So for those of you who were not at Tech-Ed, or those of you that have not had the chance or time to view the videos on the Tech-Ed web site, let me break down the three major points made about Silverlight at Tech-Ed.
Stability
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is now a fairly stable product. My team has actually be working extremely hard on an application built completely in Silverlight 2 Beta 1, and are fairly impressed with it in comparison to other previous versions of the product. Beta 2 of Silverlight 2 is in fact so stable that Microsoft is ready to stamp it with a “Go Live” license, which means Microsoft will provide support to production ready Silverlight applications.
Streaming Video Mature Model
Microsoft has been in the video business for a long time now with Windows Media and it’s Media Encoder. Silverlight sucks up all that goodness, and makes it awesomness. Silverlight has built-in codec support for playing VC-1 and WMV video, and MP3 and WMA audio within a browser. The VC-1 codec is great at incorporating media on the Internet since it supports playing high-quality, high definition video in the browser very well! It is a standards-based media format that is implemented in all HD-DVD and Blueray DVD players, and is supported by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, XBOX 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Windows Media Centers (enabling you to encode content once and run it on all of these devices + Silverlight unmodified). It enables you to use a huge library of existing video content and provides access to the broad ecosystem of existing Windows Media tools, components, vendors and hardware.
Silverlight also supports the ability to progressively download and play media content from any web-server. You can point Silverlight at any URL containing video/audio media content, and it will download it and enable you to play it within the browser. No special server software is required, and Silverlight can work with any web-server.
Blur Between WPF and Silverlight (XAML)
The big selling point of Silverlight and WPF to me has always been XAML. While I will debate Flash vs. Silverlight or Silverlight vs. Flex as happily as the next guy, there is one HUGE benefit to WPF and Silverlight that I see completely missing in all Adobe products. XAML. What XAML enables is an amazing developer and designer workflow that is simply nonexistent in Adobe products. I tried doing some some Adobe Flex stuff the other day. While I have to say, it was pretty awesome with all its rich controls, and pretty much just another development tool to me, it was missing a huge piece! XAML! Gone are the days (or should be) of creating html code, css, and endless lines of JavaScript, to make everything look nice and tie together. Shouldn’t there be one common language that allows you to design an interface in a designer tool, and then give it to a hardcore developer to make sing?
Oh right the main topic wasn’t how awesome XAML is (did I mention XAML rules?), but to explain that with version 2 beta 2 of Silverlight, the integration and cross-compatibility between Silverlight XAML and WPF XAML is getting very close? Will the lines be completely blurred soon? I hope so!
Want to Watch The Bill Gates Final Keynote?
So make sure you check back later this week for details on how you can download Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview, and Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008.