Nikhil Kothari's Weblog : .NET Rocks Interview

I did an interview a few weeks back with Richard and Carl from .NET Rocks. It was posted earlier this week... you can download/listen to it over here. I just got back from a customer visit and got a chance to check it out myself today.

The segment with me starts about 12:45 into the recording. It was fun talking a bit about various things I've worked on over the years including some of my current projects... sort of a trip down memory lane. I still find it quite strange and odd to hear myself talk :-)

One of the somewhat deeper questions was around Ajax vs. Silverlight and would one replace the other . To summarize what I said over the recording, I tend to think there are distinct scenarios that both are optimal for, rather that either one being the only choice, at least for the foreseeable future. What do you think? You might have heard of Universal apps and Experience first apps. This sort of characterization, based on the high order priority for an application: eyeballs vs. capabilities, was used by Ray Ozzie at his Mix07 keynote. I refer to it because I like how it describes the spectrum of apps, and how both Ajax and Silverlight are relevant in the RIA space.

[ Tags: announcement ]

Posted on Thursday, 11/8/2007 @ 11:39 PM | #Life

Comments

Eduardo

Posted on 11/9/2007 @ 7:59 AM

Great interview, Nikhil!

The only problem that I have with Silverlight is that it can't run without a browser, as a desktop widget or application. It would be a great solution for many projects.

The Moonlight guys are doing this, and Adobe also allows this with Air, I can't understand why MS doesn't do it as well.

It would be great to know your opinion on that!

Regards,

Eduardo Scoz

Marco

Posted on 11/9/2007 @ 8:09 AM

Eduardo,

Silverlight is a subset of the Windows Platform Foundation (WPF), so it's rather easy to rehost the silverlight components inside an application. But you probably have to setup some design guidelines that you don't use elements from WPF that is not part of Silverlight.

For me, the more interesting part is, what will be supported in the next release of silverlight. If they support too much, the plugin becomes to big, if it is too less the development is too restricted. So it's a rather fine line they have to walk.

BTW: what's up with the Linux platform? Is silverlight really cross browser & cross OS?
From that perspective, if you are interested in a vector based UI control, you are probably better of with Flash.

But let's see how far Microsoft takes this technology.

Eduardo

Posted on 11/9/2007 @ 8:34 AM

Hi Marco,
The presentation piece of silverlight is a subset of WPF, but other pieces, like the DLR, or the video codecs (not sure on this one, but anyway) are not. Another thing that is different is the security sandbox that you have around Silverlight apps.

Yes, I'm not counting Silverlight 1.0. I really agree with the comment made on one of the DNR episodes that 1.0 is animated gif's 2.0. :)

AFAIK, MS is helping Novell to get Moonlight pass all the tests, and the idea is to have Moonlight 1.1 out around the same time as silverlight.

Adobe Air and Flex is nice, but I don't think writing business apps in AS is a good idea for us here... Actually, I'm not interested in Vector UI at all, what I really want is really easy deployment of apps to the desktop.

Nikhil Kothari

Posted on 11/9/2007 @ 9:45 AM

Eduardo, I agree with the scenario you're calling out, and makes sense for a class of applications. Its certainly technically possible. Hmmm... maybe I should polish up a prototype I did on that end :-)

We're certainly looking at the deployment problems with desktop apps as a high priority general problem, and what can be done to fix it for future versions of .NET.