December 7th, 2009
Top 5 Reasons I Like Silverlight Development
Now that we’ve been doing this three months, I thought I’d summarize some of the bits about developing in Silverlight that I’ve come to love, even miss, when I’m working in other environments.
5. Out-of-browser applications
I’m sorry, but comparing Adobe’s AIR to where Microsoft is headed with Silverlight, and it’s no comparison.
One environment requires not only writing two versions of our rich media application – one for the web and another for the desktop – but requires your users to download and install a separate runtime environment just to run the damn thing.
Yes, Silverlight’s out-of-browser is still really immature. I’ve been following the Silverlight 4 beta, and it looks like it’s getting slightly better. Not “you could write a word processor in it” awesome, but it’s gonna get there.
4. MediaElement
Two of our three public projects have made use of Silverlight’s MediaElement. Our video player uses it, and rssTunes uses it to play MP3s.
I’ve “written” numerous video players in Flash, and one or two MP3 players, and the difference is stark. In Flash, skinning the default video player is an exercise in absolute hell.
In Silverlight, you just get a control that handles actually displaying the video or playing the audio, and you build the controls around it. The control exposes every event and state you’d need.
3. Control Templates
I mentioned this in yesterday’s post, but it bears repeating. The fact you can override the entire visual tree for any control, without having to subclass it in code, and wire up the events all over again, is a just a huge time-saver.
2. Visual Studio
As much as it pains me to say, Visual Studio is arguably the best IDE I’ve ever used – so long as I’m working with Microsoft technologies.
The difference between it and both the Flash IDE – a ludicrous hideous interface ghetto that no one would subject themselves to if they had a choice – and even my beloved TextMate or Xcode is ridiculous.
1. .NET libraries
More than even the IDE, the real advantage of development in Silverlight is all the wonderful things Microsoft has packed into the .NET libraries. Things like JSON parsing, a tedious chore of external libraries in other environments, is built in, and works fantastic. WebClient is one of the cleanest asynchronous HTTP APIs I’ve ever encountered, and beats the hell out of cURL.
It’s thought through, well-documented and extensive. There are a few holes I’d like covered, mostly related to image manipulation and conversion, but otherwise, it’s a dream.