SilverLight 2

At the end of October Microsoft released version 2 of SilverLight, billed by many as a direct competitor to Adobe Flash. To me this is a far more significant release than version 1, thanks to the addition of technologies that give it the ability to be used for something far more interesting than merely a video player or simple animation tool. These new capabilities make SilverLight a serious contender when choosing the platform for a Rich Internet Application (RIA).

With its small footprint and foundation upon a subset of the technologies that we at Convallis have worked with for many years, it is certainly a platform that we will be using in our own web based applications. I am particularly interested in it's capability to act as the interface for web based database applications. This has huge potential, and will in time lead to a new genre of web based applications that provide a rich interactive interface for the user, as opposed to the clunky link based interface personified by many web applications today (although to be fair AJAX alleviates some of those problems).

For more information visit SilverLight.Net which in addition to having tutorials and tools to download also has a gallery of sites that are already using SilverLight, some of them are well worth a visit.