Dennis van der Stelt

Programming Silverlight

Just attended a session about Silverlight development using managed code. I'm starting to love Silverlight the more I get to know about it. Some details about the current alpha version.

Silverlight is:

• Silverlight 1.0
• Managed Code (CLR)
• XAML Extensibility
• User Controls
• Contains sample controls

Some other info

• It has webservices support, so you can grab data from those.
  WCF support is on in the roadmap, so although currently unsure, they want it in.
• Asynchronous support.
  I'm guessing they're simply using wsdl.exe to generate proxy classes. Generated proxy classes by wsdl.exe have this in them, but it immediately answered a question from the audience if Silverlight also supported multithreading.
• Basic XML support.
  Currently they don't have XPath or XSD support, but it's also in the roadmap.
• Linq support
• ScriptableAttribute makes that your class and/or methods are accessible from javascript. Quite cool.
• Someone from the audience asked if sessions could be accessed as well. Of course sessions are server-side and Silverlight runs completely client-side. The cool thing about this is that it's (sort of) statefull, which is probably one of the reasons I like it so much! ;-)

I'm now going to listen to the master; Nikhil Kothari.
More to come, stay tuned!