Silverlight 2.0: It Just Keeps Getting Better

Dave Britton of Vertigo was at Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 and gave a presentation on Silverlight 2.0. Dave highlighted that there is a tight integration between ASP.NET and Silverlight. Silverlight also has rich tooling support with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend. Dave also recommended Silverlight Spy, you need to be using Silverlight Spy if you are doing any sort of Silverlight development. A large portion of the talk elaborated how to have multiple Silverlight components coordinate and communicate with each other via a Silverlight/HTML/JavaScript bridge. Also known as the bridge to nowhere. A debate erupted as to having on large Silverlight application versus multiple Silverlight applications working in cahoots in a single web page. The speakers main reason for breaking an application into separate pieces is for code and component reuse.

Some in the audience also questioned the speaker as to why to Silverlight instead of common and mature AJAX toolkits such as ASP.NET AJAX. Again the speaker had to defend Silverlight, this time totting Silverlight’s rich media support.

The speaker also demoed how to bind data to a table grid in Silverlight. After seeing Silverlight in action I thought it should have been called MS Flex. The parallel between Silverlight and Flash runs like the long tail.

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