Really informative and engaging CINNUG last night as Matt Casto demo-ed much of his work in Silverlight 2. Of course, with Mike out of town there had to be technical difficulties. We couldn’t get the projector working with Matt’s laptop. With a bit of finageling Tim Apke got Matt setup on his Mac.

A boatload of people attended including Rich Rayburn, Parag, Phil Japikse, Matt Brewer, Joe Wirtley, Nino Benevenuti, Peggy, Maggie Longshore, and Leon Gersing to name a few.

Ryan Cromwell from SDS kicked off the evening once we figured it might take a while to get Matt up and running. Ryan did a quick presentation on the visitor pattern.

Ryan Cromwell - Visitor Pattern

The bottom line: Don’t muddy entities classes with unrelated logic, get away from single responsibility.

Matt Casto - Silverlight 2

Most of Matt’s presentation was a demo of Silverlight 2, so there isn’t a whole lot to report on. Much of the night we spent modifying XAML and seeing what happens. Yet there were a few nuggets of valuable information.

Silverlight is the Microsoft browser plugin usually likened to Flash. From a developer perspective, the difference is that Silverlight is based on XAML, a declaritive language, to define UI, where Flash uses other descriptors. Silverlight supports vector graphics to ensure a detailed rendering at any resolution.

The XAML standard supports full 3D. Someone commented that perhaps you could load 3D renderings into XAML designer. A team somewhere is developing a Quake port to Silverlight.

WPF, the superset of Silverlight maybe, has a number of new user controls – announced at PDC – that make developing user interfaces in Silverlight a much less tedious process. When you write your own controls in Silverlight you wind up writing the same code over and over. The addition of Visual State Manager allows a developer to define styles that can then be applied to states. This paradigm reduces the amount of customization necessary for each individual control in the UI. Check out codeplex for details.

Expression Blend is the designer oriented tool for WPF and it contains a storyborad editor.

Parag using Expression Blend

Other controls include the treeview, doc manager, view panel, auto complete, and others. Again, the code is available on codeplex.

Is Silverlight ready for the enterprise? What’s the standard technology answer? “It depends.” Some enterprises do WPF work now, so the integration of Silverlight may not be a big issue. A problem with Silverlight is that all the stuff resides in the .xap file, so a change requires a full download to the client. There are ways to split this up, but the problem is not solved yet. Also, printing doesn’t work consistently, or even well, across browsers. A kludgey work-around includes implementing a managed bridge to Javascript where you layout  elements in a div in the page the way you would want it printed out. Crappy, but it’s the best solution at the moment.

Can grids compare to the .NET grids? It depends. Silverlight runs in a mini-framework pared down. You don’t get all the functionality of .NET. Yet, it’s a 4.3MB download, so a tiny footprint.

Microsoft is partnering with Novell to develop Moonlight, a Silverlight for Mono implementation that targets non-Microsoft platforms.

The bottom line? Most IT shops don’t blink at Flash as a requirement, so Silverlight may be a targetable platform.

- Andy