Silverlight is Ready for Business

Posted By: Adam Kinney | Mar 10th @ 4:34 PM | 46,456 Views | 18 Comments
As proclaimed by Ward Bell from IdeaBlade, "Silverlight is Ready for Business". Business Application development, that is.

Ward walks us through a quick demonstration of building an entity model, querying and displaying data in an editable Silverlight Datagrid.  This is all done using their DevForce Silverlight tool which makes this easy but also adds extra functionality like client-side caching binding to anonymous types.

My favorite feature, though, is the ability to run LINQ statements from within the client without having to touch the server.  In the rich client application world, this makes development a lot easier and my giddy-ness in the video is genuine not pre-planned.
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#Mar 11th @ 1:13 AM
vesuvius
vesuvius
Das Glasperlenspiel
I guess the issue not addresses hitherto is the fact the the MVVM requires quite a lot of coding, if you add that to the XAML you are having to code, then your developers have very short fingers.

This like Linq is very suspicious to me, it just looks too easy. when people are used to having to create ADO data services or WCF services, this really does look way too easy, so a very well done to IdeaBlade.
#Mar 11th @ 8:13 AM
Minh
Minh
WOOH! WOOH!
Can Silverlight run outside of the browser?

I've been looking into this question, and as far as I can tell, Silverlight cannot run outside of the browser. At least, MS is not making it easy for people to do that.

Is this true?
#Mar 11th @ 10:04 AM
Minh
Minh
WOOH! WOOH!
Hey, please share you know Wink

I figure it wouldn't be too hard since Silverlight is already an ActiveX control. I was just curious why MS is not more vocal about it since AIR already does it.

I'm more looking forward to use Silverlight as a Click-Once (traditional) replacement. With its tiny footprint it's very exciting if the desktop is opened to us devs.
#Mar 11th @ 12:18 PM
stevo_
stevo_
Human after all
Minh the reason silverlight doesn't work outside the browser isn't because Microsoft are purposely making it hard to, its because it currently *s the browser out to do its http request work.
#Mar 11th @ 1:01 PM
vesuvius
vesuvius
Das Glasperlenspiel
Why not just run it as a full on WPF application. The object model for the two is similar, if you want an application out of browser then a WPF application that is less restricted seems to me the better choice.

Is it a bird or is it a bee, i.e. is it a web application or a desktop application?
#Mar 11th @ 1:30 PM
Minh
Minh
WOOH! WOOH!
Minh the reason silverlight doesn't work outside the browser isn't because Microsoft are purposely making it hard to, its because it currently *s the browser out to do its http request work.

stevo_ I really don't think this is the case. Because http requests are just TCP connections, right? And those are already supported natively in Windows, so Silverlight wouldn't have to do much... Just a wrapper on top of the existing networking stack.

I think MS is slow to support Silverlight stand-alone is that they would have to build an entire infrastructure, from Visual Studi to Win32 runtime to support it. Maybe they're just really busy.
#Mar 11th @ 1:31 PM
Minh
Minh
WOOH! WOOH!
Why not just run it as a full on WPF application.

Vesuvius,

A WPF app requires Vista, or a HUGE download on XP. So a Silverlight runtime weighing in at 6MB is really attractive for a RIA.
#Mar 11th @ 2:53 PM
codan
codan
I didn't do it.
This is indeed impressive. But, until Silverlight supports printing, I can not agree with the assertion that Silverlight is ready for business.
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