3. Silverlight 2

When Silverlight 1 was announced at last year’s MIX, it was a streaming video plug-in. The product manager for the Expression tools, Wayne Smith, described it as a very pragmatic move. “We wanted to get a foot in the door, and the biggest foot we could get in was video—everyone wants to do video. The next logical step is rich internet applications.” Although some of the new features in Internet Explorer 8 are designed to make Ajax apps in the browser more powerful, Microsoft is pinning its hopes for being an application platform for the Web on the second version of Silverlight.

The Expression 2 beta handed out at MIX doesn’t actually handle Silverlight 2; that’s in the Expression 2.5 tools, which are previews. And at the moment, support for dynamic languages like C#, Visual Basic Ruby and Python in Silverlight 2 is in a separate 712K plug-in, called Dynamic Silverlight. But AOL is building the next version of its Web mail client in Silverlight 2, and AOL’s Roy Ben-Yoseph said even in beta, the new version is two to three times faster than the current Ajax Web mail. He showed the client with 20 email messages, 1,000 messages and 10,000 messages, without the scrolling speed slowing down at all.

Silverlight 2 does have extra media features, including detecting your network bandwidth and CPU performance, and automatically picking the appropriate bit rate encoding to play; if your bandwidth is reduced, adaptive streaming again automatically drops to a lower bit rate (and vice versa). Aston Martin and Hard Rock showed off Silverlight applications that use another new feature: Deep Zoom. “You can very easily and very cleanly navigate through very large images, and very efficiently only download the portions of the image that you need,” explained Scott Guthrie, the corporate vice president for Microsoft’s developer division. As well as zooming, you can sort, search and filter what you see, because the images and different tiles that make them up are all tagged.

Aston Martin’s tool lets you explore the details of the DBS, down to the stitching on the side-pocket of the door. The digital photo of the car interior is 18 GB, but you can zoom in and out without waiting for the extra level of zoom to download. Similarly, the photos of the Hard Rock memorabilia collection take up two billion pixels, but you can zoom out from the details on John Lennon’s suit to the display case it’s in, to the billboard that display case is advertised on, to the skyline including that billboard, to a photo album of Hard Rock Properties. That’s not one single image that you’re zooming in and out of; the billboard showing the display case and the display case itself are entirely different images but you move from one to the next seamlessly.

The Hard Rock Silverlight Memorabilia app lets you filter what you want to see, as well as zooming into it.

The tools for creating Deep Zoom images are still very primitive; Expression group product manager Wayne Smith calls them “nothing more than a Power Toy at the moment—a technology preview”. But he says that being wowed by the smooth zoom and high level of detail, or concentrating on slicing images up into the multiple tiles that Deep Zoom needs, both miss the point. “I wasn’t entirely sure whether people picked up on the notion of collections; the fast zoomed layer you get to, can be something different. With the tag system on which it’s based, it takes one tag in Silverlight to create a Deep Zoom element. It’s almost too easy; to take one picture and zoom it is a two second job. It’s when you apply it to a collection that the creative skills are going to come in.”

Silverlight for Developers

Brad Becker—once the product designer for Flash, Flex Builder and Flex, now group product manager for Silverlight and Expression—emphasized the power of Silverlight compared to other options for building rich online applications. “Microsoft has spent years and a lot of effort refining and improving Visual Studio and .NET—we spent six years working on Expression Blend. When a developer comes to use these things, she’s immediately getting all the benefits of the hardware. A lot of other technologies on the Web are really nascent; they’re new, and there’s a lot of painful learning you do when you create a platform. Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons about what not to do in terms of scalability, security, user experience, performance; we’ve gotten beaten up again and again. The Web is not suited to Ajax—it’s a hack on top of a hack. Flash was a lightweight animation engine designed to enable Mickey Mouse on the Web. Silverlight is based on the solid foundation of .NET that’s time-tested and proven; we have a platform designed for the Web today. Talk about hammering on the platform: Blend and Visual Studio use the platform to build incredibly sophisticated apps. Can you imagine building the Flash IDE in Flash? And you can’t build an HTML browser in HTML. Switching from HTML to Silverlight to get better performance—what a crazy world!”