My interview with the Switch on The Code blog
I had a good email interview with Switch on the Code about Silverlight... It was also cool that it appeared in the same post with an interview with Mike Potter (of Adobe and RIApedia fame).
Here is a teaser of just one of the questions we talked about in the Q&A on Flex and Silverlight interview.
SOTC: What features of Silverlight set it apart from the other RIA technologies out there?
BA: Silverlight fits in seamlessly to the broad .NET ecosystem. Developers that already know the .NET Framework or languages such as VB or C# from doing ASP.NET or client development can easily move into the RIA space. The exact same framework, development environment, tools and languages are available to them. This greatly lowers the costs in moving to building RIA applications. Further, it enables customers to reuse design and business logic assists across many solutions.
- In the media space, many of our customers have huge amounts of content in VC-1 format (such as WMV). Silverlight enables them to stream that content to the web with no additional costs. There is not costly server software to change the WMV content into a different format for putting on the web. This not only saves in IT costs, but it also saves server bandwidth.
- In the RIA space, Silverlight offers a mature, full powered IDE for developers and a rich set of products for designers for building rich applications. There is a time tested native execution engine in the CLR and proven languages such as C# and VB that are very productive for developers.
- Silverlight is a very open platform… The Xaml UI markup is basically a textual XML format that can be read and produced by many tools, can be indexed etc. We have implementations of Silverlight shipping today on Mac and Windows and we are working with partners for work on Linux.. We have had traction with major Ajax vendors such as Dojo to include support in for Silverlight in their open source Ajax framework because of the openness and power that Silverlight provides.
