Barak's Silverlight News and Analysis

MSN delivers Election Central with Silverlight

The Podium ’08 -- (http://election.msn.com/podium08.aspx) is Live on the MSN US Election Portal.

This is just the first of many innovations MSN (one of the largest online sited in the world) will deliver on Silverlight.

I had the pleasure of working with the MSN team on this and although this site looks simplistic, it actually encapsulate some innovative approaches to online application delivery (that leverage the Silverlight architecture):

• The site is actually template driven, MSN integrated Silverlight into its publishing system and thus it can create template driven applications; the editors are just updating meta data in Infopath xml files and the application markup is generated by the publishing system accordingly.
• The architecture of the application is an example of Software plus Services approach that uses Windows Live Search behind a modern user experience.
•  Search  visualization and rendering of service generated dynamic content is an area that Microsoft is trailblazing (please take a look at http://www.tafiti.com which is another exploration of search visualization).

Barak