Silverlight 2.0: It’s “1 better than 1.0”

Last week I was visiting an intelligence community facility which has been known for several years for housing some of the brightest and most innovative adopters of Web 2.0 approaches for classified systems. I could say who and where, but then I’d have to… well, not kill anyone, just apologize to all my other friends at other agencies who think they’re the cat’s meow on classified Web 2.0. (With any luck this anonymity now makes each of them think, “Wait, who’s more advanced than we are?  How can we catch up??!”)Well, it turns out they’re excited about something new & cool they would like to use.

These folks are big fans, it turns out, of Silverlight, Microsoft’s plug-in based RIA foundation (enabling rich internet applications and media scenarios in the browser, whether that’s IE, Firefox, Safari, etc.). Silverlight 1.0 was released last September, for Mac and Windows with Linux coming, and one of the differences from Adobe’s Flash which gave Silverlight some traction also makes Silverlight very attractive for IC and other government uses; to quote Wikipedia, “Textual content created with Silverlight would be more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML).”  That in itself is very significant for intelligence apps, and opens up all kinds of extended uses (you can read here or here about our early work at DIA with XML-based RIA and information exchange/discovery, though that was all before Silverlight came available).  And the XAML use makes it declarative, not imperative like Flash (no, I’m not talking about Kant again like yesterday).

Today there’s been an understandable surge of excitement (twittered and blogged) about Silverlight 2.0, which is preparing for its first public beta release.

Scott Guthrie, who runs the development teams for ASP.NET and Silverlight, blogs today about the new version launch.  He lays out some of the pretty impressive new capabilities and features:

• A rich UI framework that makes building rich cross-browser Web applications (and desktop Windows apps) much easier, with a powerful graphics and animation engine.
• A rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build apps, including data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc).
• Rich networking support, including out-of-the-box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services, and supporting cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). 
• A rich .NET base class library of functionality and APIs, plus LINQ and LINQ to XML library support enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support.

 Scott also has in his post today a cool step-by-step tutorial of how to create a RIA in Silverlight 2.0.  Here’s a screenshot of a simple searching-and-browsing-and-drilling-down-in-Digg client he built quickly just to show off some of the data-binding, networking, and user controls.  Oh, by the way, “The entire application is implemented in about 35 lines of C# code and 75 lines of XAML page/user-control markup.  It only uses controls and libraries built-into Silverlight.”

Keep an eye on Scott’s blog – he’ll be announcing the 2.0 beta download imminently, and will also be posting the entire Digg app he built when the tutorial’s done, natch.

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