Jason Zander's WebLog : MIX

Silverlight Podcast on HanselMinutes

Anonymous — Fri, 04 May 2007 05:05:00 GMT

ScottGu and I did a podcast with Scott Hanselman at Mix on Silverlight. You can get the podcast from Scott's blog here. Scott also posted an update version of his .NET Framework diagram here. In the podcast we cover the origin of the Silverlight CLR, some differences between Silverlight and WPF on the desktop, etc.

Thanks Scott for having us on HanselMinutes!

Origin of the Silverlight CLR and .NET Framework

Anonymous — Wed, 02 May 2007 02:01:00 GMT

One of the common questions I’ve been asked at Mix is exactly where did the CLR / .NET Framework in Silverlight come from? We actually started building this version of the CLR right after we shipped V2.0 in October 2005. The approach was simple: figure out the minimal required core that would allow a set of very common developer scenarios to be fulfilled. Size was of utmost importance and all feature contributions would have to be justified in the context of the scenarios and how much they cost us on the download. The other requirements included ensuring first rate performance and the highest compatibility bar we could get with the desktop CLR.

With this set of goals in mind, we started from the bottom up (quite literally). To keep up performance and compatibility, we kept the same core type system, garbage collector, JIT compiler, etc. This engine also includes all of the generics work added to the V2.0 release. The same approach was then applied to the .NET Framework libraries. Again the goal was simple: what is the minimal library support you need to build a compelling application. With this you wind up including XmlReader/XmlWriter, but not the richer object layers on top. Those are great features (and still readily available for you in the desktop .NET Framework). But we needed a small package. There were tons of debates and lot’s of tweaking over the last 16 months.

In order to get this done in a short time frame with high compatibility, we decided to start with the desktop CLR/NETFX. We did the factoring in that code base. In most cases, the Frameworks code is quite literally the same code from the desktop version. In other cases we kept the API signatures the same, but plumbed out the implementation on top of the browser support.

The result is a pretty small stack that still gives you superior performance and access to all your core features. We are using the same metadata / IL file format, same language semantics, etc. The real test came when we tried to run LINQ on top of the new stack and it just worked! That’s right, we took the ‘Orcas’ LINQ assembly and copied it over to run on this stack and started executing sample code. The cool thing about this is you can take a Silverlight application and your source code will be compatible with the desktop version of the .NET Framework. It is very easy at that point to extend the application to use more features of the desktop if you like. The key thing here is developer choice.

Scott Hanselman has an interesting picture on his blog of the various versions of the CLR/.NET Framework which is pretty accurate. ScottGu and I did a podcast for Hanselminutes this afternoon which covers a lot of this ground in more detail. I will post a link to that podcast when Scott publishes it.

Announcing .NET Framework Support for Silverlight!

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:17:00 GMT

This morning at Mix’07 in Las Vegas we announced something we have been working on since we shipped V2.0 of the .NET Framework in 2005: .NET support for Silverlight. I want to congratulate the team for all the hard work that has gone into getting to this point! It’s been a blast getting everything going, and over the last four months things have really started to come online. I think you will be very excited as you pick up the bits and see what we have been up to.

There are a ton of things I love about Silverlight. This is my top 10 list from a developer’s point of view:

1. All of your .NET skills transfer to Silverlight. All of the .NET APIs we are releasing are subsets of the existing support on the desktop. That means if you know the .NET API set you will be able to start using Silverlight right away (this is similar to the approach we took with the Compact Framework).

2. The APIs we are releasing are “right sized”. That means we looked for the most powerful subset we could find while keeping the size small.

3. You can use HTML and XAML. You can add Silverlight features to your favorite HTML/AJAX based application very easily and seamlessly mix the two. You can use a consistent and easy .NET programming model to write code against both. ASP.NET AJAX also supports using Silverlight through new controls we are releasing. And all of this works in your favorite browser (IE, FireFox, Safari, and (coming soon) Opera).

4. You get the same CLR from the desktop, just factored for size. This isn’t an interpreter. You get the desktop JIT and GC for superior code performance. Because we support generics and runtime type helpers (Reflection et al), we get LINQ support too. Finally you will be able to use Visual Studio for debugging on both the Windows *and* the Mac.

5. Let’s repeat that again: it runs on the Mac. And you can do full x-debugging from Visual Studio. That’s worth its own bullet J

6. Your favorite languages are supported on the client. C# and VB.Net work out of the box. With the new DLR, we have support for IronPython, IronRuby, Javascript, and the new dynamic VBx compiler. It is called the Common Language Runtime for a reason and we are raising the bar with Silverlight.

7. Visual Studio is your developer tool. You can use Visual Studio “Orcas” to write Silverlight code, debug it, etc. This is the same tool you have learned over the years and you will feel right at home working on Silverlight projects.

8. Expression is your designer tool. You can use the same Expression suite of tools to design for Silverlight projects as well. The code projects round trip between Expression and Visual Studio so you can have the user experience pro beef up your content. As an engine guy, I’m more adept at stick figures and console apps so this one is really handy J

9. Deployment is friction free. I’m going to write a longer blog entry on this one feature alone, but in a nutshell you can download Silverlight in a compact format without reboots on the machine. Your code is pulled down via the normal browser cache and executed. There is no GAC to figure out here, just point and go.

10. Silverlight is a secure sandbox system. The system was designed to support the browser sandbox from day one. This includes a new simplified security model which requires user code to be Transparent (a feature introduced in CLR V2).

The code you can build on top of this powerful base is astonishing! You get all of the power of .NET and familiarity with the class libraries only in a wonderfully factored package (easily < 5 MB compressed).

Now that we’ve announced the product I have a bunch of new blog content I’m planning to post on dynamic languages, friction free deployment, what it means to have a new CLR, porting to the Macintosh, when to use Silverlight vs the full .NET Framework, etc. Please let me know if there are particular topics you are interested in. As with our original .NET announcement at PDC 2000, this one comes with a lot of new stuff that will take a while to consume. Hang in there, it’s worth the effort!