Kunal Chowdhury, recently awarded a Silverlight MVP title, is a SilverlightShow article author who just recently joined our team of authors. Kunal has already received quite a lot of recognition from SilverlightShow community and his recent articles got one of the highest amount of hits, and many positive comments.
We are happy to introduce you to Kunal, understand more about his experience with Silverlight, and peek at projects he is working on. Meet Kunal!
Q. Kunal - please introduce yourself.
A. Well, I am from India and presently working as a Software Engineer at Varian Medical System. I started my professional career at August 2007 in non-Microsoft platform but later within 2-3 months I decided to jump into .Net permanently as I love Microsoft Technologies. I started working on Silverlight since it was in version 2 Beta 1; sometimes I also spent working in WPF too. Presently I am a Microsoft MVP in Silverlight.
Q. How did you decide to start out with Silverlight, and what helped you get the recognition of Silverlight MVP in October this year?
A. Ah, as I told, I always love Microsoft Technologies and that was the motive to explore Silverlight for the first time while it was in version 2 beta 1 stage. You can’t believe how much I was excited when I completed my first project in Silverlight with a great customer satisfaction. That gave me more opportunity to work in the RIA field, especially Silverlight. I spent a huge time to explore more about Silverlight and share the same in online communities and probably that was the reason to become a Microsoft MVP in Silverlight. I feel very proud for this achievement.
Q. You just started out a series of articles covering Visual Studio LightSwitch. What is the benefit from using this tool to build Silverlight applications?
A. See, Visual Studio LightSwitch is a next generation tool to quickly create professional level business applications in Silverlight. It has some preloaded screen templates which you can use to build your application in some easy steps. A UI developer can know the pain to create the screen that one developed using the LightSwitch. It’s actually not a difficult, but you think about the time and XAML code he needs to write. But using the LightSwitch tool you hardly need 5 minutes as a beginner. From the backend code view to connect with the database to fetch & insert records, you need to write zero lines of code. As you can see, I didn’t write a single line of code for the first three chapters of my article, but I have a completely ready database application with adding, searching, sorting, paginating records. The framework does all that for you. Yes, you can write some code to do extra functionalities. The extensibility feature lets you give the option to apply themes for your application, add custom controls to it too. And above all, your application will be ready for web & desktop.
Q. What is the target group of Visual Studio LightSwitch? Where do you see its future?
A. Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool for Silverlight application development & currently in beta stage. In the initial stage too, it has great power. If it becomes stable in near future, just think what are the features will be available there. Currently using LightSwitch you can create an online/offline data entry application. You can search, sort, modify, delete and even export your records to an Excel sheet and all without writing a single piece of code. I already demonstrated all these in my series of articles. Yes, there are something that you can write to enhance the power, which I will describe in future chapters. So, why not to use this tool? Though it is currently in Beta stage but I can think of the popularity of this tool in coming days. Hence, I started writing a series of articles for this tool, so that beginners will find it helpful.
Q. In view of the recent news on Silverlight and HTML5 at PDC10 - how do you see the future of these two technologies?
A. The recent news that broadcasted after PDC10 really confused everyone in the Silverlight industry but later those confusions were cleared by Scott & others. Personally, I don’t think HTML5 will be the reason to close Silverlight support. If that is the case, why Microsoft is currently working on Visual Studio LightSwitch and why they are working on new version of Silverlight? Also, why they are doing investment in WP7? I can see the future of Silverlight and that is a high one. See, we can do media streaming, will it be possible in HTML5? Also, we can fetch everything to client in Silverlight to give a smooth paging. I don’t think HTML5 will be able to do this. There are many developers around the world who really hates html & JavaScript codes. I am one of them too. Regarding more about HTML5, it is not yet a standard of w3c. So, no more comments.
Q. What are the current projects you are working on? What recent challenges have you been solving recently?
A. Ah, I can only say that, I am purely working on Silverlight in Medical domain, facing some real challenges on Silverlight as and when I try to explore something new. There are lots of things that we can do, but don’t know how!!! Exploring those are real challenges for me on my free time at home. And yes, you will see those in my Blog too.
Kunal - thanks for the opportunity to introduce you to SilverlightShow community. We hope you will keep contributing to creating top-quality article content on SilverlightShow!