Feedback on Microsoft Event 18/11/08 : Silverlight -Interop - RIA"...

     I was at one of last events of microsoft  which aims to present the capabilities of Silverlight framework.  More precisily it was about the interoperability aspect. There are also an induction to other frameworks RIA which exist and could be really useful, helpful by now, as Silverlight does not include yet all tools to avoid loosing time where the software development is done through a complex architecture like 3-tiers architecture! 
      The chair has been Steve Sfartz, an microsoft architect who works on the silverlight framework developpement. His blog is http://blogs.msdn.com/ssfartz. His was assisted by Pierre during the conference who did the induction of the silverlight controls!

      Before this conference, my knowledge of silvelight was restricted to building "canvas" on Expression blend software, and doing some simple animations 2D as usually done with Flash. Then, my first reflexion is why Microsoft would release out a technology just to do same things like Flash. That's why i was really interested by know more about it.
       Actually, Silverlight is as able as flash! We can do 2D or 3D animations, a lot of fun graphics animations as we usually do with flash. But this is just one of capabilities of Silverlight !

      Silverlight is a crossplatforms(windows, linux, mac) and crossbrowsers(safari, firefox ie) technology like Flash. There is a first version version 1.0 released out since 2007 but which is limited to javascript language. For people like me, who prefers C# or any improved language, we could be happy to know that the last version version 2.0 released out october 2008, include the support of C#, in a world all languages already supported by framework .NET...How is great to know that languages like rubby, python are now supported!! :-) For this first presentation, if you"re interested by a rich interface on your websit, like you have on desktop client sotfwares, silverlight could be a right response!  It's proposed like an middle solution between  heavy client (desktop client ) and light client (browser).

       For the developement environment, if you're from microsoft world like me, you'll need at least 3 tools:
- Visual studio 2008, or express version
- Silverlight tools for Visual Studio
- Expression blend for graphic work!

       For other people, interesting to know that a plugin for Eclipse has been released out and allows to support silverlight developpement for people working with eclipse. It's a really good thing as by this way some people who don't work with visual studio platform, and on other technologies like Java platform could develop silverlight stuff.
Here is the link: http://www.eclipse4sl.org/

A good tool for debugging: http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=93

 Whatever the developement environment you used to build silverlight application, the solutions is organized into two main projects :
       - Classic web project
       - Silverlight project
     The output of silverlight project is a zip with the extension "xap" which contains all assemblies. A siverlight project is composed by one or more file ".xaml" and each file associated to behind-code ".xaml.cs" in a separate file.
     Any silverlight application is able to be hosted by any web server (apache or IIS). This is possible as when we try to access to a page containing a silverlight application, this html page will make dowloading the ressource which is "xap" file on client side. THen the silverlight code will be run on the client side.
     Xaml language is structured like any xml file and the current version is xaml 2006. THe next version planned for beginning 2009, will include a new feature : development by "class" way  as did throught traditional POO method.

   To get an experience with the interoperability of silverlight, we did an application which communicate with a REST services Java application hosted by tomcat server. The same application has been able to invoke services hosted on a WCF application with REST style, hosted by IIS server.
    Silverlight supports three main communication methods:
            - SOAP
            - REST, RSS, ATOM
            - Socket support.

But there are some restrictions due to the fact silverlight is a plugin and crossbrowers:
- GET,POST methods are supported.
- return codes supported 200,404.

Others frameworks have been introduced like  ADO.NET Data services which expose directly via WCF, services to manipulate some datasources ( a set of datatables). RESTLET (http://www.restlet.org/) for java people to implement easily REST.

Cross protocol domains is available since only version 2.0. There is a crossing domain when some ressources are requested by silverlight application on another server! To allow this feature, the file clientaccesspolicy.xml should be available on the partner server, describing the rights.

  About silverlight controls, there are done through 3 aspects now:
- template (by this way you can present a button as a dropdownlist for example)
- style
- behavior
There is a silverlighttoolkit project available on the codeplex server which includes a set of controls ready to be used, like ajaxtoolkit. A multimediaplayer (silverlight control) has been shown allowing to read some videos files with adaptativ streaming format. This is a new format allowing to read a video file and accessing directly to any sequence, without downloading all the video content.

As frameworks RIA, i have to check viewmodel pattern, CSLA NET framework...Don't know enough yet about them.

A good book has been suggested : Data Driven service with silverlight 2 will be released out january 2009. But the chapter 8 is free to download....