Mess with Silverlight™

September 9th, 2009

Where we are.

It’s been six weeks.

For six weeks, our team has been knee deep in the world of Silverlight, and we’re just starting to come up for air. Just beginning the process of really evaluating what it is these new tools afford us, and just what, if anything, we have to add to the conversation.

Personally, I’ve been spending my time in Visual Studio, which I do have thoughts on, praises for, gripes with, but those are sort of beside the point of this particular project. There are a million plus posts out there all about Visual Studio, many of them written by folks who’ve spent years in it’s shiny clutches and whom would be far better suited to criticize it.

The question we really wanted to answer was: Can a Mac shop do Silverlight development? And perhaps, why would it?

That’s the big question. Why would a Mac shop do Silverlight instead of Flash? Why run in virtualization when you can run natively? Why work with something so clearly outside of the normal Mac ecosystem?

Because it’s better. Not at everything, but at some things. It’s a young toolset, and it shows. But unlike Flash, with it’s winding history of purposes, Silverlight and Expression were conceived and built to do rich interactivity on the web from Day 1. There are no absurd limitations, or strange artifacts from the past. No legacy behaviors that only make sense when you consider the kit’s full history. There’s just a bunch of blocks from which you build rich applications. There’s just a language designed, at it’s outset, for object-oriented development, with features and a library to match.

My experience over the last six weeks has been littered with happy surprises. A few not-so-happy ones, sure (why Textblocks don’t support a character spacing attribute remains a mystery to me), but on the whole, I walk away each day impressed at how easy what I’m trying to do ends up being. I wake up each morning thinking, “Maybe there’s an easier way…” and inevitably, there is. Once I switch off my Mac brain, and turn on my Silverlight brain, I find myself shoulder-deep in an environment where its obvious someone spent a good deal of time trying to anticipate what I’d be doing, and how they could make it easier. I generally feel the reverse way in Flash.

This is a set of tools everyone should be familiar with, that any Mac cowboy out there should play with, if only for a weekend. There are good ideas under this hood. Ideas that have yet to come to any other platform.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be highlighting those as best we can, but know they’re there. And try your best to trust us.

Posted by Jack