DLR

Mix08 Major Silverlight 2.0 Announcements

colinizer C#, DLR, IronPython, IronRuby, JavaScript, Microsoft, mix08, Mobile Application, Silverlight, VB.net, Web Application

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 (formerly known as 1.1) is now available.

http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/ (bottom of the page).

See the features matrix for overview of new features.

You can also get there:

  • Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008
  • Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK
  • Expression Blend 2.5 Preview

There is a Go-Live license for Silverlight 2 Beta 1

Sillvelight will be available on Windows Mobile and Nokia devices (S60/S40/Mobile Internet Tablet) – no availability given.

Silverlight uses a sub-set of WPF/XAML so you can easily create a full WPF desktop app from the same assets/code.

Advertisement

Mix 08 Keynote with Scott Gurthrie – Part 9

colinizer C#, Desktop Application, DLR, IronPython, IronRuby, JavaScript, Microsoft, mix08, Mobile Application, Silverlight, Web Application

Silverlight going mobile

Going to support Windows Mobile and non-Windows Mobile.

Demo of Mixer social app:

  • Mobile 6 device
  • App allowing you to find friends for a party
  • Aggregates twitter, photos and status
  • User ratings for venues over the night

Announcement of partnership with Nokia to put Silverlight on S60/S40 and mobile internet tablet product lines!!!

Finally something cool!

Shame about the boring SVP at Nokia reading his pre-recorded announcement.

Seems like Symbian 60 is the priority. 

Demo of WeatherBug app:

  • Nokia Symbian 60 and Windows Mobile device – same app
  • Weather icons and data
  • App done in 3 weeks
  • Animated snowy weather skin – a bit slow (‘tried to do it with Flash-Lite’ and didn’t work)

Nothing about availability for any mobile platform 😦

Mix 08 Keynote With Scott Guthrie – Part 4

colinizer C#, CLR, DLR, IronPython, IronRuby, JavaScript, Microsoft, mix08, Silverlight, Software As A Service, VB.net, Web Application, Web Service

Silverlight 2 Details and Demo

Adds to Silverlight 1.0:

  • .NET language programming in Javascript, VB.Net, C#, IronPython, Ruby.
  • More to WPF UI Framework with animations, standard controls, layout, styling/skinning (visual tree templates) and data binding.
  • More network support including sockets.
  • Local storage.
  • High performance.
  • Small Download (4.3MB), Fast Install (6 to 10 seconds) – doesn’t need full .NET framework beforehand.

Open source license for included controls.

Shipping testing framework with 2000 open source unit tests.

Shipping today:

  • Visual Studio 2008 tools for Silverlight 2.0 preview – support for Silverlight 2.0 with intellisense (XAML and code) and debugging (on Windows or to Mac)
  • Expression Blend 2.5 preview – support for Silverlight 2.0

See Scott’s blog for more info.

Demo of building new AOL mail client in Silverlight:

Shows lots of control templating to show Halo skin – not much audience reaction, but good data performance (retrieval and sorting) – uses isolated storage for performance (e.g. contacts list).

Anyone else tired of seeing demos by huge corporations that build products with advertising revenue deals that only they can get?

Mix 08 Keynote With Scott Guthrie – Part 2

colinizer CLR, DLR, Microsoft, mix08, Server Application, Silverlight, Software As A Service, Web Application, Web Service

Silveright

Currently 1.5+ millions download installations of Silverlight 1.0 per day

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 available for download

Silverlight 2 stuff

1 Improving video experience

Adaptive streaming (to computer capabilities and bandwidth) – using appropriate bitrate – at initial video start and continuously (without buffering).

Plugable adaptive streaming algorithm.

2 TCO

HD Video is expensive – streaming and progressive download.

Windows Media Services 2008 released with Windows Server 2008.

Bit-rate throttling (with IIS 7.0/W2K8 for progressive download) – initial burst and then controlled stay-ahead (by x seconds) of playback throttling

Web Playlist.

3 Monetisation

VS 2008 project for silverlight advertising template – roll-down banner to playing video with tracking.

Demo of video.show for hosting video.

AdManager for tracking stats including interactions.

Demo of ad+video with skip control on web play list.

Overlay ads using Expression Media Encoder Two using XAML – add markers for ads (‘burned in’ or dynamic).

SDK for integration with Doubleclick Instream advertising.  Demo on NBA site with handling of user events like pause, mute, etc.

Mix 08 Keynote with Scott Guthrie – Part 1

colinizer DLR, Microsoft, mix08, Mobile Application, Silverlight, Software As A Service, Web Application, Web Service

Standards-based web development

Just launched:

.NET 3.5 (includes Linq), Visual Studio 2008, IIS 7 (very componentised), Windows Server 2008

Coming in 2008:

New APS.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX update, New ASP.NET Data Dynamic.  Information about this has been on Scott’s blog for a while.

IE8 – first public preview (mostly about standards)

1 CSS 2.1 support

2 CSS Certification – 702 test cases contributed by MS to W3C group because spec can have some ambiguous interpretations

3 Performance – modern sites are script-heavy – ie8 much closer to other browsers

4 Start of HTML 5 support – supporting back button in AJAX, (first demo applause), disconnection notification, local offline storage (applause)

5 Developer Tools – Debug developer tools in IE8 – Break points, watches, object model and applicable style tree syncing from selection (applause)

6 Activities – integrating experiences – select browser text and see popup-menu of activities (maps, purchase, ebay, etc.) declared through xml in minutes – OpenService Specification (through Creative Commons)

7 WebSlices – Subscribe to information related to pieces selected on a page (then carried in browser UI across any site), declared through WebSlice Specification (again Creative Commons).

8 Beta 1 available to developers microsoft.com/ie/ie8

Silverlight 1.1/2.0

colinizer DLR, Microsoft, Silverlight, Web Application

Hello again!

Tomorrow is supposedly a big day for Silverlight 2.0 at Microsoft Mix conference.

For those that don’t know.  Silverlight 1.1 and 2.0 are the same thing.

Silverlight 1.0 (a browser plug-in) was released last year – it uses a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation in the XAML format and can be scripted with JavaScript.  You can do lovely animated vector graphics, images and streamed video.  It is cross-browser and cross-platfrom.

Silverlight 2.0 has been in alpha for a long time and it has been very quiet except for a few recent posts by Scott Guthrie recently (the man in charge of it at Microsoft).  It has a mini subset of .net 3.5 in it, plus some other classes for talking to the browser.  There’s also control/layout support for complex controls.  It also should be cross-browser and cross-platform – you can use your Windows dev machine to remote debug silverlight running in Safari on a Mac!  It may also include the Dynamic Runtime (DLR) – think immediately compiled and run code – like a command prompt, but much cooler.  See the full details.

Silverlight 1.0 is like a web presentation competitor to Flash.  2.0 is like a web-application development platform.  The implications of bring the whole .NET development community to bear (without having to worry about HTML or Javascript anymore!) is HUGE!.

The rumour would be that Beta 1 will be released at Mix, and a Beta 2 has been talked about.

The big 3 questions for me are:

  • When will it RTM?
  • When will the mobile version (demo’d as WPF/E 2 years ago!)
  • When will video capture be put in (and on mobile!)?

Oh… and when will Microsoft manage to catch up with its development tools for all these new technologies.

Check out the mix website for the live keynote at 09:30 PT tomorrow (March 5 2008).

Blinded by Silverlight – the real technology/strategy reveal at Mix07

colinizer C#, CLR, Desktop Application, DLR, IronPython, IronRuby, JavaScript, Microsoft, mix07, Server Application, Silverlight, Software Development, VB.net, VBx, Web Application

The about page on the mix website stated:

Exciting new Web experiences with the still-secret “Technology X”

WPF/E and its new branding of Silverlight were announced before the conference, so this secret had to be something else. Silverlight 1.0 is what we already knew. Let’s not underestimate it though – it brings all the XAML/WPF whizzy stuff that is the Flash competitor in 1.0 – it allows a lot of Flash ActionScript type developers and other javascript fans to do cool stuff and consider Microsoft.

The technology in Silverlight 1.1 was in fact the secret (as Microsoft has confirmed) – a full .NET engine (with a subset of the 3.5 .NET framework) embedded allowing all the .NET languages (and dev tools) to run cross-platform in a browser. The dynamic language runtime part also enables 4 scriptable languages to work in there along with C# and VB.NET.

But this, I believe, is just the start of a potentially brilliant strategy for Microsoft, as I’ll now explain.

Bringing .NET (and scriptable .NET) to multiple browsers and multiple operating systems is a huge deal. It really does mean that all the investments that people have made in .NET, can be leveraged in many many ways. There’s a reason that 1.1 is 4.24MB compared to the 1.34MB for 1.0. That’s an army many times bigger than ActionScripters with Expression tools providing a way to use existing Designer talents with WPF/Silverlight. Finding ActionScripters for projects is VERY hard – you can more easily find people that can do VB.NET, C#, JavaScript, not to mention being able to use people that can do IronPython or IronRuby – that’s 6 times more languages that can be used!

Silverlight 1.1 is really the hosting of this stuff in a browser with the VC1/media decoding. So if Silverlight is thought of as a subset of .NET 3.5 in a browser that brings Microsoft technology and tools to many browser and platforms (that’s going from windows apps into cross-everything in a browser) – a bridge to other platforms if you will, what happens if you reverse that once you’ve bridged the platform/browser gap, i.e. just have a plain executable application host on a Mac, Linux, etc, even without re-inflating the framework? Now you can potentially develop on Windows in .NET to create full (rich and connected enough) applications on the Mac and Linux (once this runtime is ported to that). You can even do the development on a Mac in a text editor (including in a browser as demo’d).

Microsoft is all about selling copies of Windows (and Office). If you can’t keep Mac and Linux away, then the next best thing is to bring Windows onto Mac and Linux. However, you can’t sell a Windows licenses that way, but you can get people to use technology that easily hooks up to Windows Live or MSN services that you do get revenue from!!!

So the real technology/strategy that I see Microsoft following:

  • Phase 1 – win over Adobe/Flash developers with SilverLight 1.0, bring Microsoft technology to the Mac and make Microsoft look cool. Provide Expression tools to bring the designers across since often there’s a lot of graphics with a small amount of scripting, vs. the other way around.
  • Phase 2 – bridge the divide by bringing .NET development onto Mac and Linux platforms with an army of existing developers that smothers ActionScripters, enabling users to become Windows Live services users – you did notice that Microsoft is ‘opening up’ their Live service APIs right?
  • Phase 2.5 – All those people that like non-Microsoft languages that were stuck on the server (and often, not a Microsoft server) – get them to love Microsoft now that their favourite dynamic scriptable language can now be used to build _client_ applications on multiple platforms…
  • Phase 3 – once across the bridge (cross-browser leads to true cross-platform), expand the hosting to enable rich .NET installed application development on other platforms making Microsoft technology and Windows Live services an indispensible part of the Mac and Linux experience too!

It’s bold, trojan-esque and both developers and users will lap it up.

If this isn’t the strategy, then it should be!

Silverlight WAS the whole keynote practically, and there’s been coverage of very little else (except about DLR) out of Mix. Nothing about Xbox-Windows links for Xbox Live from Robbie Bach (just a snooze-athon discussion and some iffy demos). Nothing about Live ID CardSpace cards or opening up Live ID to web site publishers like Passport.

This technology is the sleeper slow-release hit of Mix07. They didn’t even officially say this was the secret Technology X listed on the about page.

If what I’ve said is Ray Ozzie’s undeclared strategy, then he is indeed doing a fantastic job (despite his apparent lack of blogging and public comments). If it wasn’t his strategy then either he should make it the strategy or let it just fall into place as I believe it will – either way he’ll look like a genius…

We are living in a Microsoft world again…

Be sure to check out my other mix07 coverage.