Silverlight 2.0

Today’s post from ScottGu contains some really good news.

Rather than “just adding” .Net development capabilities to Silverlight 1.0 and calling it “1.1” they are giving people just about everything they were asking for (i.e. was missing from) Silverlight and now calling it Silverlight 2.0.

For example – Rich controls, duh. The #1 complaint I’ve heard about Silverlight 1.0 was the lack of even a basic control set for creating common user interfaces (you could create your own, but we haven’t had to do that since Windows 95 (and earlier)). Now they are adding common controls (i.e. textbox, radio buttons, tab controls, progress bar, grid, etc.) and the great WPF layout controls (i.e. grid, stackpanel) so people can just start programming their custom code instead of worrying about creating common controls and laying out the UI.

Next, two-way databinding – love WPF databinding – nice. LINQ to XML.

Also, Networking support – nice REST, RSS, WS data access, and the ability to do cross-domain network access (thank you) to access trusted sources outside your doman.

Add to this ASP.NET Extensions to easily support integrating Silverlight within ASP.NET applications (pull it all together) and we’re “cooking with gas”.

All I don’t see from my wish list is nice tools for Silverlight integration with MOSS, but I’m confident someone is looking at that pretty closely.

Looks like early 2008 is shaping up very nicely for Rich Internet Applications .

Bruce

p.s. We’re getting integrated back-button support for Ajax as well, but that’s another thing altogether.

.NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7) – ScottGu’s Blog