Last year July I wrote a blog post that listed some sites that use Silverlight to power rich application content. Twelve months later and I have found a few more cool ones, although the Hardrock Memorabilia site still remains my favourite.

ShineDraw still remains a great site for checking out the same things done in either Flash or Silverlight. And its updated regularly, which is always great.

In the meantime though I have found two other cool examples of Silverlight:

• http://windows4all.com/
• http://www.xrez.com/yose_proj/yose_deepzoom/new/XRez%20Xtreme%20Pano/index.html

What does it take to host Silverlight content on a site? Why would I want to publish Silverlight content on my website?

Well, to host Silverlight content on a website that runs Apache is not the same as running .NET content on IIS. Its kinda obvious that .NET content cannot and will not run under Apache. Remember though that Silverlight is a plugin, the same as Flash, and you are simply pointing to a file (XAP) that executes on the client side. Silverlight is a client side technology if you really think about it. I have in the week for instance, experienced that content will not immediately update on the client side even if you updated it on the server side.

It is thus possible to run Silverlight content on Apache, as this simple HTML document shows. It however seems that running Silverlight in WordPress requires an iframe:

Why would I want to run Silverlight on Apache? There are many reasons I can think of and the list may grow or shrink depending on what I think is relevant for me, but here are some reasons:

• I can keep my C# skills and keep using Visual Studio. Why would I want to give up using one of the best and most powerful IDE’s in the world.
• Silverlight is a genuine Flash alternative and because it integrates so beautifully with Visual Studio and C# I can truly start developing great rich internet applications

As I sit waiting for the Visual Studio Service Pack 1 ISO to finish downloading, I spent some time looking and reading about Silverlight and about C#. I have found one or two good websites, ones that I go to regularly to check for updated articles and source code. So three of my favourite Silverlight websites at the moment:

• Martin Grayson’s Adventures of a ‘Devigner’: The title, ‘devigner’, of the blog suggests that Martin Grayson sees himself as a real designer/developer. Maybe he has that one thing that all developers sometimes miss, the knack to design and develop in one breath. I guess neat and tidy and functional is not always good enough. Then again creativity, in my opinion, can be subjective.
• Smart Draw:I have linked to them before or written about them before and they keep the website updated with new source code all the time. I like the fact that they actually illustrate that it is possible to do something both in Flash and Silverlight.
• Silverlight Made Simple by – Corey Schuman:

Is another favourite website of mine because I got source code for a simple media player from it.

Silverlight 2 was officially released recently, which meant an entire update of tools and plugins, hence the reason for downloading the Visual Studio Service Pack 1. With the new release of Silverlight you need to download a few things:

• Silverlight Developer Tools
• The updated Silverlight Plugin
• Visual Studio Service Pack 1

I downloaded the ISO for the service pack because I wanted to distribute it on more than one user machine.

I am busy with a Silverlight video player at the moment, and what is interesting to note and understand is that Silverlight is heavily event-driven, as is ASP.NET and a lot of the .NET framework. You can attach event handlers to almost any object, from mouse event handlers to click event handlers.

Having asked that question I took a look at the ASP.NET page life cycle and just realised how intrinsic events are in the .NET framework. There are eight basic stages in the ASP.NET page lifecycle:

1. Page Request
2. Start
3. Page Initialization
4. Load
5. Validation
6. Postback Event Handling
7. Rendering
8. Unload

Within the page lifecycle there are events raised, which allows you to write code that initialises controls that are dynamically created.

I would be the first to admit that not a lot of people have heard or know about Silverlight, which is Microsoft’s rich internet plugin, which is an alternative to Adobe’s Flash. It is true that Flash has been around for a long time and that Silverlight will not dislodge Flash’s entrenched following and use. But maybe, just maybe Silverlight was not designed for that purpose and that if people respond to Silverlight in certain ways it means they are taking some notice at least. The response clearly does not take into account the opportunities Silverlight offers a .NET developer. As a .NET developer I can use my C# skills to develop rich internet applications. I do not have to learn Action Script. Those same skills that I use to develop Silverlight applications can be used to develop WPF applications, ASP.NET applications and Windows applications.

So Silverlight has gone from Beta 2 to Release Candidate and this means that developer tools have to be updated again. This is a pain sometimes, but I guess it goes with liking to develop on a particular platform (.NET). You can read Scott Gu’s article here.

Have you ever seen any of the Steve Ballmer videos on Youtube where he sells Windows? Well here is another one, but interestingly enough if you click through to the Windows I’m a PC Website you browse through a myriad of short video clips of people that say “I’m a PC”. This is Microsoft’s attempt to create a better image for Windows Vista, and I don’t know if it works and if it will work later on. Another interesting thing to note is that even Microsoft use Mac and Adobe products to develop the graphics for this campaign, as can be seen in this post. I admit that I love some of the Microsoft technologies that I work with, especially Silverlight, simply because it opens up opportunties for me as a C# developer.

I found a really cool Silverlight/Flash website that basically shows you how to do the same thing using both sets of technologies. The site is called Shine Draw. Its interesting to note that in all the projects the Silverlight projects’ file sizes were almost double in size.

So there I was today trying to understand why the Script Manager code and the Silverlight Javascript didnt want to work together. I soon realised and figured out that in your Script Manager tag you have to specify all the references to the Silverlight Javascript files. After I did this everything worked perfectly, and I was relieved, because I wanted to use Silverlight as a feature on a project I am developing.

The Silverlight issue, though, was not the issue that occupied my mind the most. What occupied my thinking and strategising the most was to understand why content management for a website is so important, and particularly why it is important. The most important reason or benefit for that matter of content management on a website is that you can separate business logic and presentation logic and in so-doing alter the presentation logic more easily. That is the single most important benefit of content management. If you look at a content management system such as WordPress or Drupal it is easy to see that the presentation and business logic has been separated, hence the reason people are able to create themes for these content management systems and interchange them without losing the content. Content management systems present one caveat – the content is consistent but makes it difficult to implement uniquely designed pages without breaking the content management system.

Silverlight is not a very mature implementation but the technologies it uses for that implementation aren’t new or unknown. Sure, you have to download a plugin to view Silverlight content, but other than that the technologies that are used in Silverlight are not new. Flash uses ActionScript which closely resembles JavaScript and wonder above wonder Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 uses JavaScript. Silverlight does use a technology set called XAML, but then again XAML looks and feels like XML. XML is not a new technology either. With Silverlight 2.0 you can use .NET Programming Languages such as C#. Again C# is not a new technology, and even though it has been around for less than 10 years its syntax is strikingly similar to Java and C++, which have been around for longer. Where is all of this coming from? Well in the week, Friday, to be exact I tested a Silverlight 1.x application on a local Intranet. I wanted to see what difficulties users might end up with if required to download the plugin. I sent the URL to a few developers and asked them to test it for me and one question that came back was “How long has this Silverlight technology been around?”, which got me thinking. Silverlight as an implementation is new, yes, but its underlying technology is not. There will be issues with the implementation, as with many technology sets, but the key for me as a developer is that I will be able to take my JavaScript, C#, XML and database skills and be able to build on them with this new technology. From a designer’s perspective Silverlight will not introduce any new technology sets either, because all the graphics elements used within WPF and Silverlight are Vector-based. The graphics elements are represented as XAML and interestingly enough you can export Adobe Illustrator files as XAML and import that directly into Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008. Personally I think that shows great interoperability.

The point though is that in today’s development environment technology maturity may only point to an implementation specific issue, not a technology subset. The technology subsets that an implementation is focussed on will in all likelihood be a mature technology already.