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.

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.

Well I can scarcely believe it myself. If you had asked me a few years ago if I could imagine using FireFox as my preferred debugging environment in .NET then I would have laughed hard, but yes folks it’s true. IE 7.0 is driving me insane with how slow it is whilst debugging. Let me take you through a course of events that led me to writing this post.

It all began with me developing a company intranet application using WPF XBAP technology and several views (I am using MVC) into it I decided to update my source control to tortoise 1.5.0 and grab the newest version of Ankh as it was meant to work nicely in Vista. So, no problems with the installs and just as I open up VS.NET 2008 I discover that the Ankh install has caused VS to loose its project history and my profile settings as well and it begins to set up as though for the first time.

Now I am a patient guy, so I just quickly get things back to the way they were and fire up my XBAP ready to start work again. I create another view port for my application and decide that I would like to run the application to see this new view…..oh oh, default settings have gone back to IE 7.0 and it’s a tad slower than FireFox in loading the application and just as slow in releasing the IE  process and stopping the debugger too. I wondered if the trick to getting the XBAP back to loading by default in FireFox was the same as it is for ASP.Net? A quick look for the context menu option on the XAML files does not show up with a ‘browse with’ so I decided to open an ASP.Net application and reset the default browser from there, then switch back to the XBAP and hey presto - the problem is solved. See below for the visuals:

Go to an ASPX page and right click to get the context menu and select ‘Browse With’, then select FireFox as the default browser….reopen my WPF application and my XBAP now loads in FireFox by default and I’m all done!