Office Applications on the Web with Silverlight?

Silverlight is making the web glow at a rate we haven't seen before. If you are a .NET programmer you probably have already read my post about Netika's GOA Winforms for Silverlight that lets you port winforms windows platform application projects to Silverlight 1.1 on the web..

Well, the company has come through with a new DEMONSTRATION of the power of their product. They have put together an entire PowerPoint style application and launched it on the Web as a demonstration of the power of the company's Winforms for Silverlight.. If you have Silverlight 1.1 installed you can view the application by CLICKING HERE.

This is really amazing to look at and play with it proves you could create web based versions of standard "Office" type applications very easily with GOA-Winforms if you are a .NET programmer. This really shows how ahead of the game for "R-I-A" applications that Silverlight 1.1 for .NET is. This really shows how far the .NET programmer is ahead of the game for development over other so-called "R-I-A" platforms (gasping for air anyone?). Before anyone says it, yes they have a version of the application that outputs to Flash runtimes, but the reality of it, is the GOA Winforms product is aimed squarely at the .NET programmer using Visual Studio as their development enviornment.

I have to say this company and product continues to impress me. Go over and play with the demo, you will be amazed right down to the online "collaboration" menu on this demonstration application. If you are developing real applications with Visual Studio and need to port them to the Web GOA Winforms for Silverlight. This puts "R-I-A" development on a whole new level which isn't possible in other RIA platforms, because of the sheer maturity of the windows platform controls. I'd love to see paint.net moved to this format, because it's very possible they could do this and in my opinion it would put other so-called "photo" retouching type applications for the web to shame, just because of what can already be done here..

This is a great development tool, and it's all available now..

Targeting your Silverlight Delivery Platform

By Don Burnett

Silverlight Announcements

Today there has been a lot of buzz about Silverlight turning 1.0. No more beta 1.0, no more release candidates, it's officially 1.0..

Over at Silverlight.net there is a lot of buzz, including a "coverflow" style carousel of videos of new Silverlight website experiences. When you mouse over the rotating content you actually can see a "live" thumbnail video of the content.. Very cool custom control..

 

If you want to see some really cool content you need to go over to WWE.com. The lighting effects on the WWE Silverlight Launch Page are very cool are thanks to the unique video capabilities with things such as alpha channel and the video brush. There is video in the background, not just the player window.

Quoting from Today's Microsoft Press Release:

"REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 4, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today released to the Web (RTW) Silverlight™ 1.0, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the Web. In addition, Microsoft will work with Novell Inc. to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, called Moonlight, and based on the project started on mono-project.com.

Silverlight significantly reduces development and deployment costs and provides enhanced Web audio and video streaming and playback using industry-leading Windows Media^® Technologies. Microsoft unveiled new Silverlight customer experiences on “Entertainment Tonight,” HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment, and also launched the Silverlight Partner Initiative, a program designed to foster collaboration among solution providers, content delivery networks, tools vendors and design agencies."

So it looks like the Linux Silverlight initiative is full steam ahead and has some backing from established industry leaders as well.

 

Deployment Planning

If you are a developer and you are looking to do a Silverlight project for a client you might be asking these questions.

What does 1.0 Release give you?  Can you deploy today?

What's the 1.1 release and should I wait for it?

How long after 1.0 release version will the 1.1 show up? Should I wait for it?

Should I only develop for 1.1?

To answer these questions I am going to steal a few slides from Tim Sneath's wonderful presentatiosn on Silverlight. This should have been also a Microsoft DevCares presentation it's so good. So please check this out..

 

What does the 1.0 Release give you? Well everything color-coded in white on this slide..

 

The 1.1 version obviously is planned to have data binding support with LINQ, Web Services (REST, RSS,SOAP), layout controls and DRM support.

 

It's really obvious when you look through this slide and the rest of the presentation, that 1.1 "Alpha" is just that and not feature complete and that several areas of functionality for 1.1 are still in development. They go further with a ROADMAP slide to spell out when they "believe" the 1.1 version will hit beta along with the other tool sets (Expression Studio, and Visual Studio '08). These are expected time frames, and not official dates.

Silverlight Roadmap

The presentation goes on to say they are shooting for the following layout controls in a later release of 1.1.. (Note since this was posted to Mr. Sneath's public blog by link to his live drive storage, I assume this information is public knowledge..)

Layout Controls: Button, TextBox, Scrollbar, Slider, ListBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, UserControl, Canvas, Grid, StackPanel, ViewBox, UserControl..

Missing in Action: Treeview, RichTextBox, and DataGrid

Other Features planned: Data Binding (through LINQ), improved Mouse events, keyboard events,  and the big one for me and most animators the ResourceDictionary. More styling options are mentioned but not further addressed. That actually sounds exciting.

Missing in Action: hardware accelerated 3d. This is very difficult to support in a cross-platform sort of way, because of the diversity of machines with different 3D capabilities.

It does look like we will see improved web services support although POX and JSON are already supported now.

Targeting 1.1

With all of this and the further advantages of the refactored .NET implementation that's inside  the Silverlight plug-in, the 1.1 version will have much improvement and is on it's way to becoming it's own "platform" that is machine independent. 

1.0 is already "lighting" up the web.. If you can do everything your application requirements say in 1.0 then you should target that release. It's obvious that they will move easily and be compatible with 1.1.

If you need the functionality of 1.1 then you should download the developer release and tools and start your development process and expect release in "early" 08.

With all the things being done in 1.0 if you look around an compare your requirements, you might find that it fits your requirements now and is right what you need.

Other options: if you are an enterprise developer and thinking about wanting to move an enterprise "WinForms" legacy app  to a web browser, you now have the option of Netika's GOA WinForms for Silverlight 1.1. It gives you the same capabilities for applications (with added XAML) and makes it easy to port a standard "WinForms" applications to Silverlight today.. Check out their site for further details..

If you don't need cross-platform functionality you might find that a WPF XBAP browser based Windows Application gives you the right amount of functionality, and gives you a lot more bonuses (like hardware accelerated 3D).

 

MICROSOFT PRESENTATIONS ( Thanks Tim!):

Building Silverlight Applications Using .NET

Silverlight Business Briefing

Rich Web Experiences with Silverlight and JavaScript

Technorati tags: Silverlight1.1, Silverlight1.0, Microsoft Deployment Targeting, Silverlight 1.0 GOLD, WPF (XBAP), GOA WinForms Pro

GOA Winforms Pro Continues to Amaze with Silverlight

by Don Burnett

The nice folks at Netikatech who are doing the product that implements WinForms projects (and WinForms controls) into Silverlight projects are doing a great job of moving forward with the product, in only a few days they have brought together a full WinForms end-to-end application solution. What's really cool about this is it works on the Mac and the PC and now with the Silverlight RC it works great in Firefox Browser environments. The idea of a full database driven WinForms application running cross-platform on the web, is just phenomenal and it shows the power of Silverlight and GOA WinForms Pro. If you are working on projects in an enterprise development and you are thinking about making your applications work in the browser to lower overall deployment costs and give you better ROI, this product is for you.

Here's are some test screens just to show you the "wow" factor and the complexity of the interfacing that is possible. Literally a full fledged interface is available.

The performance is much faster than one would expect from a browser application including anything done with Ajax.. All the WinForms interfacing functionality that you expect is there, and .Net's performance. Of course this looks like an old style Windows application, but that's just fine for corporate and enterprise applications. Developers will appreciate the speed and the UI standards that have been a hallmark in windows enterprise applications for many years, and frankly it makes it an easy port.

Here's an example screen with a modal dialog box enabled (yes the message box windows are draggable).

And here finally is some time scheduling UI, showing some great project management and visualization..

Considering you can take a regular Windows Platform application and port it now to the web as a viable program that works anywhere, this product has more than great potential. As designers we talk about new UI, I can only hope that the final product lets me extend these applications with my own XAML (wait it can! I forgot about the XAMLCanvas control). Even if it doesn't it has great Enterprise potential.

There is also a Flash version to this, but the Flash folks don't seem to be talking about this, as it would be a great boon to their RIA efforts as well. Many people have complained about Rich Internet Applications in Flash and AIR still being a little light in functionality. This product zooms ahead in terms of functionality and bringing REAL applications to life with all the complexities we expect from an application that runs from the OS, not the browser.

COMPANY BLOG

I'd like to thank Jean Gab for keeping me up to date with what's going on with this product, it's a mind blower that they could do all of this in such a short amount of time. This makes ports of windows platform applications so easy and to make them cross-platform. You should be checking this out if you are into enterprise development..

Technorati tags: GOA WinForms Pro, Silverlight, Windows, Platform applications, WinForms to Flash, Netikatech