Why I want Silverlight to succeed in a huge way - [A new year wish].
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.
There are two big roadblocks to Silverlight success.
1. Silverlight is holding itself back(No Rich Text, No right click, i.e. bad web behavior, no multiselect listbox, and many others)
2. It’s just not in use like Flash. Until the runtime gets out there, and that could be years, you can’t build internet applications unless the users are in a controlled environment(and that sucks). Which means you can forget building the next great website for a customer, unless you’re using Flash.
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Couldn’t agree more that standard UI frameworks ie. Silverlight, XAML (and for the moment I’d add to that list jQuery UI) will hopefully make RIA development a lot easier in the coming year. On the web-client side jQuery UI, which I assume the ASP.NET MVC crowd will embrace, will hopefully keep things more uniform.
And as most of these now support accessibility standards like ARIA, using these rich client technologies no longer seems to be a no-no.
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Fallon
I don’t expect the maturity of the control suite to be held back for too long and if it is then perhaps your right and that will hold it back. Also, Microsoft claim to have significant penetration with Silverlight already so who knows, but at any rate I am not concerned with the public web and my business focus is squarely on the ‘controlled environment’ of the SME. I do believe that there is a class of application that Silverlight 2.0 can work for and I expect that the types of applications that exist along that axis will grow with the platform.
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Sorry, I thought you were taking a more global view, but yes, I’m working on intranet projects, so it doesn’t affect me either.
However, it limits where you can take your business model in the future. Silverlight is making inroads against Falsh, but at this point it’s STILL only has 10-15% marketshare(http://riastats.com), and that includes version 1.0.
The fact is that if it could get more marketshare, I’d dump all those silly Javascript libraries, and use invisible SL controls to control the DOM and suck down my data.
Unfortunately, I’m stuck with Javascript for the forseeable future because MS can’t get marketshare for SL… bummer.
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