Introduction
Silverlight 3 is on its way with tons of new goodies. But each technology has to be well accepted from the business users in order to be successful. But what can help the business to take such a decision? We, at SilverlightShow.net, think that sharing experience is a good start.
This article is a part of our “Shared Experience” initiative that aims to give a place to every person or company that has experience in a commercial Silverlight product or project to share that knowledge. If you are one of them and you are willing to participate, download and answer our questions. In return, we will publish not only your answers, but a white paper of the Silverlight solution you have.
Let’s take a look at what David Kelley from IdentityMine has shared with us.
Who David Kelley is?
David, that would be me, for the past 10 years has focused on distributed application design and emerging Microsoft technologies on the web. Having helped design and build some of the largest systems for companies like Microsoft, Onyx Software, Saltmine, Giordanous Group, IdentityMine and more, he has been on the leading edge of applying the latest tech to real world business problems. David's technology breadth includes everything from SQL Server to Windows/WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and Silverlight. David's accomplishments also include developing new technologies such as self editing XML files and related XML technologies to fuzzy logic systems and advanced web user interface design. As to Silverlight in particular David built some of the core Popfly blocks in Silverlight, and many more Silverlight applications including Chart Controls, media players, multiple Silverlight Hacks and was part of the team that built the Entertainment tonight Emmy site in Silverlight. He was the lead on the Silverlight Crossfader.com community site and built the Silverlight demo for BG's TechEd 08 keynote. David has also done Silverlight Reporting for Ray Ozzie CSA Microsoft.
David, Silverlight 3 seems more close to the business than before with all the new cool features announced there. But is it really ready for commercial applications?
Absolutely. Granted Silverlight 2 didn’t have everything but we used it in a number of solutions where it was able to provide a better more completely tooled story then other environments for building Web 2.0 User eXperiences. With Silverlight 3 the story only gets better for building rich UX LOB apps.
What are the key improvements in Silverlight 3 that will speed up the adoption from the business compared to Silverlight 2?
Key improvements around data binding, animations and especially improvements to blend with the sketch flow functionality really help us in delivering solutions. This improved process will make it easier for us to push adoption of Silverlight 3 vs. Silverlight 2.
When Silverlight is the right choice for business usage, in which cases?
Silverlight is the right choice for business usage on a number of cases. For us the most important case is speed to market of solutions which is related primarily to tool-ability and workflow and to improved support for key design patterns such as MVVM. Other key business cases include user experience where a Web 2.0 experience is going to save in learning time and will be easier to use. Another key business case is the fact that Silverlight can provide the web 2.0 experience on any platform with the best tool-ability story. In other words I can have the same code base with the best user experience and visualizations and get it done faster than with other platforms.
What about reporting / printing in Silverlight – it is crucial for each LOB application?
I work in SL3 now entirely and the printing story is good at least for what I have been doing as of late. I have not tested to make sure it is entirely consistent across all support platforms though but would expect it to be relatively consistent. There are also a couple of things to consider when 'printing' Silverlight apps. For example, say I have a pie chart that is in a grid set to some size on my page. If I print it or rather print that 'page' that it is on it will render the largest size allowed in a given space so if your relying on HTML page size remember that is different than printer page size and Silverlight will try to be smart enough to figure that out and 'help' you by rendering or changing height and width to fit printer size which is not always a good thing. That all being said from my stand point it is solid enough to support LOB. In the case of the most recent executive reporting system we had the app designed to launch a page where we pass some params to render the same chart w/o the controls and other app chrome and we would fire the print command via html and it works great, although w/o color some of the Silverlight hotness is a bit black and white. :)
Are there cases in which Silverlight is not recommended and if yes, why?
We, in the high end UX development shop, are going to only shy away from Silverlight with even more rich UI issues come up. For example Surface development or complicated real time 3D we would go to a WPF model. For Mobil development we would shy away from Silverlight even though Silverlight for mobile application development is coming.
Are there companies in your client’s list, which have already worked or are now working on Silverlight projects?
Microsoft, DPE Microsoft, more Microsoft, Entertainment Tonight, Accela, Accruent, Forbes, Seattle PI, PhizzPop, Hotel 1000, plus several financial firms, professional sports and more.
Can you tell us in what industry are they and a bit more about the projects? Your answer will help people from the same or related industries to consider using Silverlight as solution.
Our clients are all over the map but we have a number of clients in the financial vertical and hospitality vertical as well as lots of R&D stuff for Microsoft.
You know in concurrent environment, the speed and the quality of the provided products and services are essential for each successful business. Does Silverlight improve the development speed and quality?
Certainly with our team it does. Granted some of that is the fact that we have been doing it since day one.Many of our key developers and designers have worked with WPF and then Silverlight on those teams at MS but really the enabling point for those deeply integrated teams is the tool-ability story of Silverlight.
What do you think about the Sketch-Flow – does it reflect the real business processes of developing products?
Sketch-Flow makes some of our key processes much easier. In my role and many of our designer roles they are evolving into more of a UX architect then a designer, information architect or programmer. And the idea of a UX architect becomes much easier with Sketch-Flow allowing the actual mockups to evolve into the real thing.
It seems that Silverlight has almost everything needed by the business, but what about the third parties? What more could they offer?
Besides the current features, the underlying Silverlight environment is more open with Silverlight 3 because we are now able to write custom pixel shaders, and have the file and bit streams more accessible. Thus we are able to write custom video codex and we have more advanced controls. Silverlight is a deeply enabling UX technology for the next generation systems, from 3rd party control vendors to clients and everyone along the food chain.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
More Silverlight please :-)