All true developers love getting to play with new technology and ours are no exception. When our CEO suggested we take a look at Microsoft Surface there was a queue forming to visit the Microsoft offices to see what it has to offer. But I’m going to save that for another blog entry, largely because it’s so different we haven’t yet thought through all the implications and possibilities.
Another recent development by Microsoft is Silverlight 3. Silverlight is essentially Microsofts answer to Adobe Flash and has been around for some time. It offers a rich user experience for web applications but until Silverlight 3 we haven’t been able to consider it for Document management applications due to some restrictions on interaction with the local machine. This made it either difficult or impossible to use with Document Management for features like ‘check out’ or ‘export’ etc… Silverlight 3 overcomes some of those issues like the ability to save documents locally and brings other nice features like the ability to deploy the silverlight application to the desktop and run outside the browser. Add to this the support for multiple browsers including FireFox, Safari and Internet Explorer allowing use on operating systems like Mac OS X and Linux in addition to Windows. The developers at Infonic have already written an MS-Sharepoint Web part using Silverlight 3 and its performance and usability have such a ‘wow’ factor we are now porting the entire web application user interface to Silverlight. An added benefit is the user interface development is much faster than traditional Web development so not only is the end result better, it’s developed faster !
Silverlight 3 is due for official release this July and we hope to have our product tested and released before the end of year. For those wanting a sneak preview of it we already have an early build deployed so contact me for details. For more details on Silverlight 3 see http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/overview/faq.aspx
Tim
