This past week a colleague and I attended a Microsoft event on Silverlight and Expression Studio. Given that we will be giving a brief report on the sessions at our weekly staff meeting, I thought it would also be a good idea to also make this the first "real" post to my blog...

The presentation consisted of two sessions: "Building Rich Interactive Applications with Microsoft Silverlight" by Bill Zack and "Delivering Rich Web Experiences Using Microsoft Expression Studio" by Peter Laudati. Bill and Peter are Microsoft developer evangelists. Because there were a lot of questions, most of the time was devoted to the first topic, which was alright with us because that is what we were most interested in.

Silverlight -- despite their claims to being more than this -- is basically Microsoft's answer to Flash. Like Adobe Flash, Silverlight runs as a browser plugin, and is good for displaying vector-based graphics and animations, and streaming video. I don't know enough about Flash to offer a detailed comparison and although I'm sure Silverlight offers some real technical advantages over Flash, I am a little skeptical that it is that much better. The main two claims that it is not just a rival's version of Flash were that Silverlight is a platform for developing real applications and that it supports streaming high definition video (recommended for Intranet environments that can support the bandwidth requirements). I don't know about Flash's video limitations, but I think it is hard to argue that it has not become a development platform of it's own. Still, the advantage of Siliverlight, for me, is that I can leverage my .Net skills and develop in Visual Studio to create Flash-like applications.  Silverlight applications are developed using XAML and Javascript. Also, starting with version 1.1, developers can program Silveright applications in various .Net languages such as C# and VB.NET.

Silverlight 1.0 was released about a month ago and Microsoft is planning to release version 1.1 in the first quarter of 2008. Currently, an alpha version of 1.1 is available for download. There is a Silverlight plugin available for the Mac which they demonstrated by going to hsn.tv on a Mac Powerbook. One current disadvantage of Silverlight is that it does not have as wide an install base as does Flash. Like Flash, Silverlight runs as a browser plugin which must be installed on the client machine. A member of the audience asked why Microsoft doesn't include Silverlight with a Windows Update (which would mean millions of people would automatically download and install it with out most of them even knowing what it is). The answer was that Microsoft would likely have legal (anti-trust) issues by doing that. I am sure that is for the best, but as a developer I will be reluctant to recommend that clients rely on Silverlight until it reaches some sort of critical mass.

Microsoft Expression Studio is a group of applications for designing web and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) applications. The first (and current) version of Expression Studio was released last spring and does not support Silverlight. The next version will be released in early 2008 and will support developing Silverlight applications. The Expression Blend application is used for creating and editing XAML, the markup language that is used to create the interface elements for both Silverlight and WPF applications. Expression Studio also includes tools for designing and editing HTML, managing digital assets, and encoding videos. The key advantage for both Expression Blend and Expression Web (the HTML editor) is that they allow web designers and producers to work with Visual Studio projects. This means that the programmers can concentrate on application functionality without having to implement the UI design. This eliminates a scenario that they described, and one which I often encounter: an artist gives a developer a design in the form of a comp image and the developer tries to implement with their tools and knowlege. With Expression, the designer is able to produce the files that are used by the application and the designer is even able to make changes after the developer has worked on implementing the functionality of the application.  Where I work we have web producers who help create the html and css -- but it seems to me that the Expression could help facilitate the process between the developer and producer.