Coding Day

Back to my previous post, WPF/Everywhere recently become Silverlight with the addition of new languages and new platform. Actually it’s not a new platform it’s a subset of IronPhyton programming language and it’s called DLR Dynamic Language Runtime. So more to .NET static typed languages, we have some new dynamic languages to be used for scripting in Silverlight. Moreover they will support IronPhyton, IronRuby, JavaScript and VB as dynamic language. It is still possible to use the Silverlight to code using the class library.

I think this is a different move and strategy from Microsoft to target more platforms with completely new and immature languages. However it is very promising in terms of technology it provides, cross platform cross browser flash like environment for different programming languages. We had .NET in different platforms like ASP.NET in the web server, Windows Forms and WPF in Windows and now we have .NET in the browser. You don’t have to have .NET framework to be installed because it comes with a small subset of .NET Framework in the plug-in.

So what it adds more browsing experience is of course the usage of .NET languages and a subset of .NET framework. It means that we can write multithreaded Javascript or C# in the browser plug-in. Different than server client model, the application executes in the client and uses their resources. The silverlight plug-in watches for user interaction and a call-back is being sent to the plug-in or to the browser. JavaScript serialisation, JASON, and marshalizing stuff are handled by Silverlight as well. It allows using asp.net style declarative programming, LINQ and WPF in the browser.

The platforms officially supported are Mac and Windows of course. In a very early stage (in 2 weeks after release) Mono has been released their implementation of Silverlight called Moonlight. This was quick because of the open source and BSD style license of Silverlight. So it is becoming a real cross platform in that case, just like flash does with more programming languages and techniques.

Silverlight is very good at advertising as well. A new developer platform space for sharing Silverlight projects is open, PopFly. It is the area to put silverlight applications and see what is possible with Silverlight. Moreover it is also possible to get 4GB free hosting space from Microsoft Silverlight Streaming. However we don’t know how much they will charge later on.

Silverlight might compete with flash in very short time. Flash is de facto standard for most of the browsers.A lot of web applications run flash to provide rich client features, now Silverlight come to the area with the power of .NET framework and your favourite languages.

It has been more than a year since Atlas is out. I remember playing with the first hands-on-labs for doing a search query. I also really liked the Ajax Control Toolkit since the first day, still using two controls in a project. Now that baby is out of CTP, BETA and ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is released. A lot has changed since it’s first release. The objects in javascript library, the method names, object names and the product name have changed. As a result, we have 2 separate products. ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0 (Client and Server), ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit . There is one more product which is ASP.NET AJAX Futures January CTP. This is the additional javascript library to provide additional functionality.

Interestingly, it has been shipped with source code.  There is no escape for the client source code release but they also include the server side controls which is good. Although we don’t have the server side controls code, Scott Guthrie announced the server side controls source code will  be released shortly. Client side is released with Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) and server side with Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL).  The client side is more flexible in terms of license to extend the library.  

Thanks to the team…