Monday, 23 November 2009

Silverlight in General & Silverlight 4 Beta

I was both surprised and impressed to see Silverlight 4 Beta released at PDC09.

I have been highly impressed with the development speed and features of Silverlight.
As you will see from my other posts I have been developing with Silverlight since Silverlight 1 where we just have JavaScript as a client programming language.

We currently run all of our web facing applications with Silverlight 3.
As we are serving external users we are still maintaining a "static" (as in not evolving) ASP.NET version of some of our applications such as the Web Cameras so that users don't miss out because they don't want to, or, due to IT policies, they cannot install Silverlight.

I am impressed with users visiting from countries other than New Zealand, and major corporations, as they, in most cases, have Silverlight already installed and can enjoy the latest fully functional version of our web applications.

There are many people whom refuse to install Silverlight purely because it is a Microsoft product, we have to respect this decision, just like people still wanting to use IE 6 :-)

Looking at the capabilities of Silverlight 4 Beta I look forward to upgrading our applications to take advantage of the new capabilities.

Congrats Microsoft Silverlight Team