Silverlight's Future and my Silverlight 2.0 Wishlist

As some of you may know, when Silverlight 1.0 was first demonstrated and announced, I referred to it as a "steamy pile", and I still stand by that assertion. For me personally, I can find absolutely no redeeming qualities about Silverlight 1.0. It's nothing more than an attempt by Microsoft to gain critical mass before pumping out the real product - Silverlight 2.0.

Silverlight 2.0 is where the beauty lies. This is an RIA developer's dream. Why? Basically because it gives you some of the best application development models available:

• XAML-based GUI. I don't need to go into all of the reasons why this is so powerful, but it really is powerful.
• C#-based server-side code. This is huge as well. This let's you re-use your existing skill and learning investment in the .NET Framework when building RIAs using Silverlight.
• Sits nicely on top of ASP.NET. There's a real sweet-spot of combining traditional ASP.NET (by that I'm talking about the MVC framework here, of course) and RIA-style application or applet functionality supplied by Silverlight.

Don't get me wrong though, it's not all good. If Microsoft wants Silverlight to succeed, there are a number of things they're going to need to do. They are already doing a lot of these things, so hopefully this new technology will take off. Here's essentially my Christmas list for Silverlight... This is what I told Santa I want in a powerful new RIA development platform:

• Better design experience. The design experience for Silverlight is nonexistent right now. Sure, I can use Expression Blend, but that thing sucks and it frequently produces XAML that won't parse, at least in the CTP bits. We'll see what Silverlight 2.0 brings once they get the re-versioned bits out (HINT. NUDGE. WINK. drop the bloody bits now!)
• Better designer-developer workflow. So many of Microsoft's developer tools in the past have been developer-only tools. If Microsoft doesn't make it drop-dead dumb easy for a designer to design the GUI and interaction of a Silverlight "page" that can then be handed off to a developer for plumbing - they're going to lose a huge pile of developers to Flex/AIR. Why? Because Flex is Adobe's brainchild... You simply can't compare to the design experience and designer-developer workflow of building Flex apps. That workflow is flawless in Flex. It is one of the few points in which Flex is obviously the clear leader.
• Better development environment. When building my Silverlight app, it needs to be able to consume services from cross-domain locations. I don't care about production environments when I'm debugging my code, and I don't care about cross-domain injection security concerns when I'm testing my code. I care if my code works and I don't want to spend 4 hours kicking Visual Studio and my VM environment in the head to exercise 4 lines of code in a service consumed by Silverlight for a simple smoke test. MS needs to enable extra privileges to Silverlight apps being debugged in Cassini, period. This isn't a wish, this is  requirement.

Right now Silverlight is on a precipice. Microsoft has a chance to make a huge stir in the RIA arena which is currently not an arena that Microsoft owns, by a longshot. If Microsoft plays its cards right, and gets the developer experience for Silverlight 2.0 right, then people (including me) are going to jump all over it. I can't even count the number of applications that I want to build in Silverlight once the dev experience is more robust.

If Microsoft screws this up and makes the developer experience suck, they stand a really good chance of letting a lot of developer mindshare slip away from Silverlight and revert (or worse, convert) to Flex. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that MS is going to pull this off.

Time (and newer bits) will tell. As soon as I can get some serious Silverlight development done, I'll start posting samples, sample code, and my impressions of its feasibility as a true enterprise-class RIA development platform. Until then, we get to sit back and watch the endless pile of animated bouncing bullsh*t demos that showcase Silverlight's animation capabilities and completely neglect its true power - a .NET-driven cross-platform RIA framework.

tags: silverlight  future  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit