Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

Ok I’m just going to come out and say it - I don’t want to know two UI frameworks equally as well or perhaps I should say one ‘less well’ than the other. It’s a fact of life that a great deal of we .NET developers  (the majority I would think) work for an SME and also that the great majority of work we do is not public facing web sites. These SME’s form a significant portion of Microsoft’s Market and the main two UI frameworks used by this customer segment, have up until recent times been developing their application using Windows Forms or ASP.Net. More recently, Microsoft have invested heavily in UI frameworks grounded in the XAML which offers perhaps the first real opportunity we have seen for a unification of a single set of skills to be employed both across the web and desktop. Historically of course we have witnessed the relative failure of the Java Applet and the ActiveX control but we shouldn’t let those failures deter us from exploring success with WPF and Silverlight.

I have to say that as a Rich Client kind of guy, I have always been at odds with ASP.Net to a degree. Web Forms was a revelation of sorts when it was introduced and it continues to be a very useful and highly productive framework for web development in the SME IT environments. In pursuit of improving the quality of software the web toolkit exists in a vast nebula of expanding stars which surround ASP.Net Web Forms. Today as Web Developers it’s becoming incumbent on us to have strong skills in CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, JSON, JQuery, DHTML, MVC and the list goes on and on and on and on and…….and this is complicated by the lack of consolidation caused by browser discontinuity - don’t get me started on that.  The huge mesh of variation in skill requirement with these technologies is something that never really played well with me and one that I have resisted by and large. I do still from time to time get to develop in ASP.Net, however I still resist these outlying technologies and one might argue that within the context of my business domain that’s perfectly valid (if not required) as a choice.

What I want to be able to do is focus squarely on XAML based UI skills and  leverage  this with  equal impact on the desktop or the web (or to be precise over HTTP and in the browser) and not feel boxed into my limited abilities with the standard web box of tricks that I named above. Now it’s true that I don’t do a great deal of work on the public facing web however that is not synonymous  with my never having to need to build highly scalable applications that exist behind the firewall and even support large user bases outside of that same firewall. If I can affect a streamlining of my team by leveraging XAML via WPF and Silverlight and work richly on the web and desktop and avoid the toolkit soup that comes with browser development, then I will be a happy man - a very happy man.

Certainly these days there is diminishing resistance to the idea of Silverlight becoming more prevalent as an alternative to the prevailing approaches and some of the noise in the blogsphere and opinion in the podcast domain is warming to idea. I would just love to get to the point where my UI technology choice can be more consistent and at best be uniform.