Light Relief

When Microsoft first started talking about Silverlight I was immediately attracted to the idea of the technology. Partly because I think that a viable competitor to Flash is needed and partly because Silverlight applications are created using languages and tools that I'm already familiar with.

But it's one thing being attracted to a technology and liking the idea of it, but that doesn't mean that the technology won't turn out to be a waste of time, after all there are many new ideas and technologies that have come along only to fail to get much needed support and have therefore disappeared. So I decided that I needed to give Silverlight a test drive, to find out if it really does live up to my expectations.

The result can be found on our new 'Fun' page, a version of Sudoku which runs in the browser. I conceived it as a 'fun' spare time project which would allow me to try out several of the features of Silverlight 2. Including the ability to program in C# and specify the interface using XAML much as you would with a WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application (ConvallisCRM for instance).

While by necessity it only implements a subset of the technologies found in .Net 3 (to keep the browser plug in installation small), my experience with developing a .Net 3 application meant that there was a very shallow learning curve and I soon had the bare bones of it sorted out. Refining the interface proved a little more challenging as I did find one or two issues with a technique that I have used successfully in WPF but failed in Silverlight, but that proved to be down to known bugs. At least I now know what to avoid.

In conclusion I must say that from my development perspective Silverlight has lived up to my expectations, it's relatively shallow learning curve (providing you are familiar with .Net 3) means that for me it's a very strong contender for internet development.