Robin Mestré

CREATE APPLICATIONS THAT ARE ACCESSIBLE, DISCOVERABLE BY SEARCH ENGINES, AND SECURE.

Microsoft Windows is the most accessible operating system platform and with the standard controls, Silverlight aims to continue this accessibility seamlessly from desktop to browser.

Despite having the power of the .NET framework available within the Web browser, Silverlight remains securely contained within the Web browser, unable to access desktop files or resources.

Silverlight content is described using XAML, which provides a text based mark-up for all content. A significant benefit here is that this can be quickly transformed into HTML, which can then be appended to the page. This composite can be searched by all major search engines ensuring that your content appears in users’ searches. Going forward, we also expect search engines to be able to crawl XAML files, which will remove the need to transcode to HTML. Figure 8 below shows an example of creating a more searchable site in Silverlight.

The Toyotafishing.com micro-site was built as a Flash site in 2007. A baseline Position Analysis Report (PAR) was completed and showed dismal results for a set of Toyota branded, Toyota sponsored anglers, and bass fishing terms. The total keywords ranked for by Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and Ask.com in March of 2008 was two.

iCrossing examined the current obstacles to search engine indexing efforts on the existing site and to integrate natural search strategy with Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. One of the greatest obstacles to natural search was that there was very little content on the pages that was outside of the rich media player which rendered the site effectively empty to search engines. By breaking up the content and determining which was best suited for display in rich media containers and placing the rest of the content outside in standard html we were able provide the search engine spiders with consumable content to evaluate and index appropriately.

Kim Kyaw, Sr. Engagement Marketing Planner, Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc summarizes:  “Silverlight has allowed us to integrate rich-graphics while still allowing search engines to crawl the entire site. Toyotafishing.com, which initially could not be found by search engines, is now ranking higher in search results.  With the implementation of Silverlight we have seen not only our connectivity to the site increase, but an overall improvement in functionality.”

DELIVER APPLICATIONS TO ALL MAJOR BROWSERS ON MAC, WINDOWS, AND LINUX.  EXTEND SILVERLIGHT EXPERIENCES TO THE DESKTOP AND MOBILE DEVICES USING THE SAME TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES.

When you create applications for Silverlight you’re actually creating one application that will run equally on   Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari on Windows, Mac and Linux. Silverlight on different platforms and browsers has exactly the same functionality, ensuring the same experience for all your users.

Going forward, Microsoft will also deliver these experiences on mobile devices. Bringing Silverlight to devices expands the reach that developers and designers have when creating rich internet applications, and enables them to easily leverage content, assets, and code that they are using today for browser-based Silverlight applications.  This same toolset can use the same assets to create fully fledged desktop applications and mobile versions of the application. In the case of devices running the Silverlight plug-in, there is no need to have a separate version of the application for Web and devices – Silverlight acts as a single common target platform.

Microsoft will add support for Windows Mobile and is planning to work with Nokia to enable Silverlight on many of their mobile phones and operating systems (for example, Nokia Series 60 – see figure 9).  Support for Silverlight on Windows Mobile and Nokia devices will quickly help change the landscape for the types of user experiences consumers can expect from their phones by bridging rich interactivity, wireless data, media and more. We will continue to explore other mobile operating systems and devices over time.  

In summary, Silverlight on mobile adds a clear route for extending applications/services into the consumer’s pocket. If you’re building Silverlight applications for the Web now, then you’re already building Silverlight applications for mobile in the future. Just like the Web version, Silverlight on mobile will take the form of a browser plug-in.

THE COMPREHENSIVE SILVERLIGHT SOLUTION INCLUDES FAMILIAR MARKET LEADING TOOLS, SERVERS AND FRAMEWORKS.

For organizations with an existing development capability it’s likely their developers already use the tools and languages for creating Silverlight applications: Visual Studio. The Visual Studio family ranges from free Express versions of the tools to Enterprise  Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools in Visual Studio Team System ensuring that whatever your needs there is a version of Visual Studio for you.

Because Silverlight uses Visual Studio for development, it also enables a wide range of other helper technologies to be employed. Visual Studio itself comes complete with a full-featured code and XAML editor, a debugger, a profiler and a data designer.

Silverlight is built on the .NET framework; introduced over 8 years ago, .NET is now in use in over 100,000 organizations and understood by over 4 million developers worldwide. .NET takes care of the common tasks that developers typically have to code, freeing them up to concentrate on developing features specific to an application.
Development with .NET and Visual Studio integrates Silverlight with a broader range of Server products from Microsoft. This makes integration simple with servers already running business functions including SharePoint Server, SQL Server, Windows Server, Microsoft Dynamics, BizTalk Server.