Silverlight Beta Has WCF, LINQ, Windows Controls!
(
Mar 06 2008 - 08:29:58 AM by
Timothy Khouri) - [
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I can't stress enough how amazing this is. When the Silverlight alpha came out, I was very disappointed due to the fact that there was no standard windows controls (TextBox, DropDownBox, etc). There was also no WCF support, meaning you're basically stuck with glorified JavaScript application. I was consistantly reassured by a good friend of mine who works for Microsoft (Jonathan Cater) that the beta would fix all of that, but I was still skeptical.
Why WCF in Silverlight is Great
Silverlight (as you may already know) brings amazing power to the web world in that you get beautiful rich content abilities, embedded audio and video codecs, cross-browser and cross-platform abilities and more. But many argued that you got the same with Adobe's Flash.
Where Silverlight destroys Flash and Java Applets is in version 2.0 (currently in beta) which brings a powerful slew of .NET support including WCF. WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) gives you the ability to build client / server applications on a TCP based connection, HTTP based connection and more. It's so incredibly easy to use verses the traditional "write it yourself TCP client", that I predict we are going to see a complete change in the Internet as a whole.
Be prepaired for MMORPGs (online video games) that have a Silverlight client end. Be prepaired for big corporations to drop windows apps and build robust (SoA based architecture) applications in Silverlight. Seriously, buy stock in Microsoft right now... and in 2 years cut me a check with a percentage of your profits... I'll accept personal checks.
Silverlight Windows Controls
I'm also pleased with the "windows controls" that are in Silverlight so far. I will admit that I haven't looked too much into them, so don't expect me to give an exhaustive list. But what I will say is that when the alpha came out, I was thinking "what happened to Microsoft!?" But, after seeing the TextBox, DatePicker, Calendar and ListBox I realize that they will not disappoint me with the release version.
Visual Studio 2008 and Silverlight
Another great thing that I forgot to mention is that there is much better Visual Studio support now for Silverlight. There's intellisense, a nicer editor and the like. Also, when starting a project, you have the ability to create a Web Site, Web Application or just an HTML file, whereas in the alpha, you could only start with a basic HTML file.