Microsoft: The real Silverlight premiere is now

Since the very beginning of Microsoft's venture into distributed video platforms, it's intended to make a system for enabling developers more conventional languages like C++, C#, and Visual Basic to produce truly distributed applications. The code word for this is "n-tier logic," and it refers to the ability for a core application to assume its input/output is being handled by a set of graphical resources, while enabling any number of intermediate layers to connect the core with the graphics. That way, the only technical differences between a local app, a network app, and an Internet app take place in the middle of the chart -- for example, is there IIS or isn't there?

When Microsoft started testing what it had called Silverlight 1.1, it was with the idea to introduce .NET app languages to the mix, and to go beyond JavaScript. Sometimes you still hear a hint of the arbitrary dividing line at Microsoft, between C# "developers, developers, developers" and JavaScript "designers." During the learning process, the company evolved the 1.1 project into Silverlight 2.0, whose stated goal was to provide fluid graphical functionality for rich Internet applications (RIAs) using any .NET language.

But something was missing. The "developers" knew it, the "designers" knew it, and yesterday, Microsoft admitted it: It was the logic in-between. So even though yesterday's keynote event at the MIX 09 conference in Las Vegas focused on Silverlight 3, perhaps the most important element of that introduction is actually .NET RIA Services, which also premiered yesterday.
Though Corporate VP Scott Guthrie only mentioned it by name a few times, in truth, the entire hour-plus demo yesterday was a culmination of .NET RIA Services -- it's the part that binds data and resources directly to graphical controls.

".NET RIA Services define and support a pattern for exposing a set of operations on resources," reads a white paper on the topic also released yesterday (PDF available here). "A developer authors a DomainService to define a set of operations on resources. The framework and tools collaborate to generate code for a corresponding client-tier that can be used for data binding, validation etc. Services for authentication and user settings can be used out-of-the box with the operations and resources. The patterns and services utilize the foundation of the ASP.NET counterparts and extend some of the common ASP.NET Web application patterns for use with a richer presentation tier enabled by Silverlight."

As Microsoft's director of product management for Silverlight, Brad Becker, told Betanews yesterday, he believes that this binding was one of the key elements, if not the single one, that RIA developers skilled in Flash have been waiting for all this time. Becker should know: At Macromedia for eleven years, he was senior product designer for Flash and Flex Builder.

"We took a lot of the things that we've learned in our previous platforms, in .NET, WPF, WinForms, ASP.NET, and we're basically applying a lot of this to the rich Internet application space...so that it's not a RIA ghetto anymore, so to speak, from a developer perspective," Becker told us. "The developer experience...it's been a real second-class experience, and it's been really difficult to build RIAs over the years. Now, you basically can build them in a really great way with end-to-end tooling."

Since Silverlight 2.0, Microsoft has made a concerted effort to offer Flash developers a kind of re-education, to help them cross the bridge from what the company perceives as animation building to application building. One project culminating from that effort is Project Rosetta Stone, a series of textual and video tutorials that illustrate the key differences between the two modes of RIA construction.

But one thing that series managed to illustrate almost too clearly is how different the skill sets truly are, a bit like clay sculpting and iron welding. From an iron welder's perspective, it seems trivial to be moving dirt with your hands; from a sculptor's point of view, iron welding is only for making things with iron.

"I think, honestly, [Flash developers] are waiting to have time to learn this stuff. People have limited time and resources," Becker remarked. "There's a bit of unlearning they need to do, like monkeying around with movie clips and timelines and frame rates...for an application? That certainly makes sense for an animation, but for an application? There's a lot to gain for them once they make the switch. But there's always a switching cost too."

Chris Swenson, who works alongside Becker as a senior strategist for the .NET platform, chimed in: "We feel that the market for .NET development was incredibly underserved by existing RIA technologies. There are over, we believe, six million .NET developers worldwide, and they had a very difficult time using their skill sets, using their existing developer [tools], the back-office solutions to build such an application. Now we're giving them a way to leverage their existing investments to build rich Internet applications."

Intermediate layers like .NET RIA Services made possible yesterday's demonstration of designer tools such as SketchFlow, a system where Web designers can literally draw pencil sketches of ideas, make workable interactive demonstrations with those pencil sketches, and then use features in the new Expression Blend 3 to translate those demos into actual working code.
"A lot of people assume that there's this huge market of RIA developers out there," Becker told Betanews. "And our data tells us that there really aren't that many people out there that have been really doing RIAs. I think it's because there weren't the right tools and platforms for that.

"The first version of Silverlight was very interesting, but it was really mostly about managed accounts and...well, video," he continued. "With Silverlight 2 and the CLR and .NET additions there, it really opened up developers, and that was just six months ago. So really most of this has been 300,000 or more designers and developers just coming on-board Silverlight in the last six months. So I think this is the first time that there's been a really viable platform for developers with really comprehensive tooling that developers expect...It really feels like we're laying down the Transcontinental Railroad, so to speak, the first end-to-end development experience for building RIA applications."