Denver RIA Developers Group - Silverlight Intro Review

Last night I had the pleasure of sitting in on a Silverlight introduction by Microsoft MVP, David Yack. Coming into this experience with little exposure of the product, the seminar was aptly suited for the newcomer with enough tech talk to engage the quick minded. While the focus gave an introductory run over Silverlight 1.0, the majority of the presentation was on the new beta 2.0 features.

Silverlight 1.0 exists in the same space as Adobe's Flash and Flex products. While 1.0 was a simple browser object, 2.0 gets into both desktop and server realms moving into the serious RIA and desktop space. While many features are still in development, Microsoft's offering looks promising. With two big players competing for this space, the advantage goes to the web who will enjoy fully developed products from both sides.

The two features I found most interesting were the Ink and Deep Image Zoom components. The Ink component gives Silverlight developers access to tablet users writable surfaces. This empowers RIA developers to take advantage of screen writing processing input either within the silverlight object or off to a deeper layer. The second component, Deep Image Zoom, offers high resolution image zooms within reasonable bandwidths. Operated by dynamically segmenting and stitching large images, only partial images are loaded as the image is viewed. With Adobe's acquisition of scene7, I can only hope this feature is not far behind in Flex.

More Information:

• David Yack
• Microsoft Silverlight
• Denver RIA Usergroup