Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

On several occasions just recently, I have heard the idea being promoted that Silverlight is being taken up largely for it’s video application and that is where it’s purpose lies. I really can’t understand why this miscomprehension (IMO) still exists. Certainly the Obama Inauguration and the Olympics were quoted as references (again) but they are surely exceptions and in no way reflective of what’s happening in the small to medium enterprise.

My experience of late is suggests to me that SME .Net shops, where existing skills can be leveraged to build line of business smart‘ish client applications in the browser, is becoming an appealing possibility and is in fact indicative of my own personal story of late. I have long been living in the world of developing for the desktop and so the inevitable move into WPF is just that bit more compelling when you bundle Silverlight into the bargain. But I must say that I hope to hear less of the idea that Silverlight is simply for Video applications. Just check out the Silverlight forums and blogs that are proliferating. I think it’s becoming clear that there is significant momentum behind Silverlight and for it’s place in the line of business application and if you don’t look around in the SME space then you might not really know.

Ayende created Rhino.Queues.Storage.Disk a while ago and followed with Rhino.Queues and left it to the community to join them together. I would love to have transactional ‘store and forward‘ available as a design choice that incorporates Silverlight and I’m wondering if these two abandoned children of Ayende’s might provide the basis of an answer? Maybe not. I can see that wrapping Isolated Storage read / write operations with some kind of veneer might be useful however really what’s required here is a solution that enlists in transactions (System.Transaction) thus  making our ’store and forward’ pattern safe and durable. Offline Silverlight with MSMQ? Perhaps, but for now that’s a hack. What about localhost WCF with a database behind it? Sure there are ways and means and somehow this is something I don’t see Microsoft investing in as it’s probably a bit too ‘fringe’ as a requirement, so it’s probably going to be up to the community. Personally I will probably wait till Silverlight is working offline (by design) and reconsider durable storage with Silverlight until then. In the meantime however I am absolutely loving working with XAML based UI in both Silverlight and WPF and going back to Windows Forms is not something likely to ever happen. Oddly, when I open a WinForm application in VS.Net I get the strangest feeling, almost like the one I used to have when opening the VB6 IDE after having developed in .NET for a few years. Must be sign?

Recently I found myself wanting (needing) to quickly find IsolatedStorage files that my Silverlight application  was writing to disk. This requirement was based on ascertaining whether the structure and detail of the XML I was writing (to Isolated Storage) was as expected and also be sure that my files where being persisted as expected. I found myself wishing (bleeding) that instead of having to dig around the file system to find the files I could have benefited from an integrated solution that could plug into VS.Net and tell me exactly what was going on. This has me thinking that I should write an Isolated Storage Profiler that both plugs into VS.NET 2008 and works as a standalone. Any thoughts? Useful to anyone else but me? Any ideas to throw in?