Mr. Andry Handoko, CTO Intersoft Solutions, shares with SilverlightShow.net thoughts and their plans about Silverlight component development. It seems they already have much experience and found potentional problems when dealing with Silverlight.
1. How does the component development for Silverlight 1.1 go?
We currently stop the component development using Silverlight 1.1 until it reach final build or at least until the RC version. We found out that the Silverlight 1.0 is more reliable in term of stability and performance.
2. What difficulties are you facing?
The main show stopper for us in Silverlight 1.1 is that when your Silverlight assembly component size is reaching > 2Mb, the downloading process often crashes the browser especially if the client’s internet connection is slow (< 128 kbps). We have informed Microsoft Silverlight team about this critical issue, hopefully they manage to resolve the problem in the next beta.
Due to this reason we decided to go with Silverlight 1.0 and wait until Silverlight 1.1 is getting more stable.
3. What do you think about the Silverlight as a technology? Is it (or will it be) really a Flash-killer as it has been written in many blogs?
It’s still too early to say it will be a flash killer, but it has lots of potential to compete and I put my bet on Silverlight J.
4. Which is the coolest thing about it?
I would say two things:
- The ability to control things through codes (.NET or through JavaScript)
- XAML concept where designer and developer can work together on the same platform
5. What do you miss in Silverlight?
- Layout Panel (Flow, Tabular, etc)
- Perspective transform effect
- Textbox
6. Are you adopting existing code or did you start from a scratch?
We started developing when Silverlight 1.0 is released, so we started everything from scratch. We’ve also done research on Silverlight 1.1 from scratch as well.
7. How is the overall performance?
Silverlight 1.0 offers better performance when delivering the content (initial start up). Besides that, both version seems give the same performance at runtime. However we found some lagging issues when dealing with animation with many objects in some browsers such as Firefox.
8. How will the Silverlight be used – as a small part of a site showing multimedia content only or a whole sites based on it? There are plenty of sites completely written in Flash.
It can be both, depending on the nature and the objective of the websites. But for now we are going for smaller part first, making website interactive can start with small things J.
We used Silverlight 1.0 as the main rendering and visual effects that sum up to a highly reusable control for ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2005/2008.
9. Can we expect something before the official release of Silverlight 1.1 and if so will it be reliable and ready to use?
Our components development is still mainly targeting Silverlight 1.0 platform at the moment. We will release WebUI “Sirius” in early 2008. When Silverlight 1.1 RC or final version is released, we’ll start to research again and start from there.
WebUI “Sirius” components can be expected to be mature, reliable and ready to use because it is based on Silverlight 1.0 platform which has been officially released.
10. Do you plan to release free control packs and/or with included source code before the official release of Silverlight 1.1?
If we happened to release components targeting Silverlight 1.1 before its official release, we will provide a free preview version to be used by public. We don’t plan to release source code though – as most of our products have been tightly depending on our own client side framework.
11. What components can we expect from you?
You can expect feature-packed modern navigation controls and slick UI components for your RIA Web application. We will be also offering new generation of controls that are impossible to be done due to limitation in browser and DHTML technology. We already have a solid roadmap for Silverlight platform development and will commit to deliver it as planned. We will announce further roadmap when our first plan “Sirius” is delivered in early 2008.
12. How will the components be distributed – prices, packs?
It will be per developer basis, as of other Intersoft’s products.
13. What are your expectations for the market of Silverlight components? Do you expect new players?
I think several existing vendors are going to offer Silverlight components as well in the near future. However since Silverlight is considered a new platform, it would take some time to learn and research the new technology and how it fits the development ecology as a whole.
New players could arise as the Silverlight technology matured – I have seen a lot of Web developers geared toward Silverlight platform. However, we will continue to come up with new breakthroughs and innovations in the Web market.
14. Is there anything you want to add?
I think that’s all for now. Thanks for the interview session.
Other component vendors plans: