It has been quite a while now since the last time I posted a development oriented post so I thought it might be time again. The last few weeks I’ve become heavily interrested in Microsoft’s Silverlight as it seems like a natural choice for one of the applications our shop is developing.
Currently this software is built on a Shockwave base using Director but the team is running into the ceiling of what is possible. Another downside is that most of our shop is Microsoft and .NET based and this makes it impossible to share components and behavior between applications directly.
Silverlight seems to be an excellent might be an alternative but unfortunately the technology is still so young that it is hard to find really good information about it. This morning though I read a useful post by Ed Burnette explaining Silverlight and the main differences between versions 1.0 and 1.1. Hopefully we will see more good posts about Silverlight in the next few months now that the 1.1 alpha is out.
Update: Just found out that Microsoft has no plans for adding 3D support to and as this is pretty essential for us it seems that Silverlight is not that good a fit as I initially thought… A well, the technology is still nice and even while it may not help us very much in doing 3D in the browser, the dynamic language facilities included in version 1.1 are way cool. In the meantime we are investigating the possibilities of WPF browser applications which do support a subset of DirectX. Unfortunately this seems IE only but that doesn’t seem to be a huge problem in our shop.