Just attending the NxtGenUG Cambridge session on Silverlight 3. A quick count shows between 30 to 40 people attending.
The talk starts with a very staged performance involving Richard talking to a pre recorded self over a webcam support call. It is a tad cheesy but heck, I like it.
The talk then moves on to the 2D perspective manipulation. This makes it very easy to take a 2D image and manipulate it in 3D space. This would make doing a carousel effect very easy and it also works with all content. This is proved by taking a business application form and quickly transforming it by spinning the form round and adjusting the perspective. The form still works but typing text in backwards and at an angle isn’t exactly usable 🙂
GPU acceleration is then discussed and demonstatred along with pixel shading. The GPU acceleration only applies to video (and on the mac only applies to full screen video). I thought the GPU acceleration also applied to pixel shader effects in Silverlight 3 as well. Wouldn’t mind digging into that a bit more.
However, the pixel shader effects are still cool. Way beyond me but the thought that I could find a water ripple effect and bring it in is a very tempting prospect.
Next up is caching and compression. The caching and compression story in Silverlight 3 sounds very compelling. Currently the Silverlight 3 install is actually 40k LESS than the Silvberlight 2 install even though it has much more crammed in. This is quite an achievement by the silverlight team.
The xap files are now much more compressed as well so delivering your silverlight files to your end users is going to take less bandwidth. The figure quoted is a 20% reduction in size.
Also, your own assemblies can now be cached. In Silverlight 2 it would only cache Microsoft assemblies so this is good news. Microsoft has done a good job of compressing as much as possible.
It seems you also get control of the actual caret in a text box. And to demonstrate this, a 1 pixel wide image of a ‘carrot’ for the caret :). I know – more cheese but it got the chuckles.
Moving on to styling and the Silverlight 3 story is much better. It feels like there’s real separation in regards to the design elements which has also caused the most questions from everyone so this seems to be a big win for everyone. Styles can also be applied programmatically (and probably with databinding directly) so it is possible to change the style on the fly which will be good for providing more dynamic theme support. Styles can also be applied located in external assemblies so providing customer specific styles will be much more streamlined.
After a break for pizza we move on to the out of browser experience. This is one of the areas where I think Silverlight 3 will be strongest and can’t wait to get the chance to implement this in some of our projects. If this can be linked with a good synchronised storage solution (like Microsoft synchronisation services) then this will be fantastic as Silverlight 3 will detect when the network is connected. Occasionally connect computing here we come.
It also detects new versions so not only is deployment simplified, but upgrading is also simplified. I’m not sure on the extent of this (for instance, whether you get the chance to hook into the upgrade before and after to be able to migrate stored data). All in all it sounds very promising.
Deep linking also looks very nice so it is possible to link directly to a point within silverlight. This also enables back button support within the browser so no more hassle with the user clicking back expecting to just go back one small step and instead goes all the way to the start of the application (or beyond).
There was also a demonstration on how different silverlight islands on a page can talk to each other. This not only works at the page level but also between tabs and even between different browsers which is quite impressive.
In general the talk focused a lot on the presentation whizzy side of silverlight rather than on the line of business application side of it. Although silverlight is gaining more market share, flash is still the dominating technology for more marketing driven rich content so the spinning video type elements don’t feel as persuasive in that light.
Where silverlight will win more is the rich line of business side of things and also the out of browser based applications so in this regard silverlight is competing in the adobe air space more. It will be interesting to see how silverlight progresses in that space but I didn’t see enough from this talk that really emphasised that point.
All in all it was an enjoyable evening.