Welcome to 2009!

We are all fully back at work. Yes, I started early and did a Silverlight workshop with my most enthusiastic student, Mark Mann.

While there is a long way to go to become experts at Silverlight, we both learned so much! The most interesting project was to create a fully dynamic menu system, i.e. a menu that will work from data in a database.

Clearly some clever things were done by Microsoft's developers and it looks like Silverlight will have quite a following. But, whether it will be a Flash beater is yet to be seen. Flash has a long track record and has a lot of support. But it does seem that Silverlight has an edge when it comes to integrating into the back end, be it at this stage only really ASP.Net. But, I am sure some work will follow to provide support for other back end technologies.

PS: In case you are wondering what Silverlight is. It is primarily a front end (running in the browser) technology to provide what is known as a rich user interface (really meaning graphics and text that can move, zoom, fade in and out, play movies, etc.).

What is interesting about Silverlight is that aside from a plug-in (which must be installed on the browser) and a little JavaScript, is that the "Silverlight instruction set" gets sent from the server in XML format (the particular application is XAML). Though, now (from Silverlight version 2), the XAML file actually gets compiled to a XAP file. This does two things: (a) it compresses the file for quicker loading over the network and (b) the XAML isn't exposed for all to see (and steal).

Interesting stuff.