Silverlight: Enter the Breaking Changes

One of the dangers of using pre-release software is the breaking changes that inevitably come along before the final version.

The number of breaking changes between WPF beta 1 and WPF beta 2 were enough to discourage me from continuing on that platform until release. Actually I still haven't had a chance to get back into it, but I will.

Joe Stegman of Microsoft has posted the first of what I'm sure will be many breaking changes for Silverlight. You can read the blog here.

Keep in mind that even though he's posted this list, don't think that this list is a final comprehensive list of breaking changes between Silverlight beta and the RTW version. Expect more breaking changes to come.

Silverlight Sidebar Gadgets in Vista

At Mix07 I asked the question, Can we write gadgets for Vista using Silverlight? The answer is yes, but nobody knew how to do it. Well Charles Sterling has a post today on his blog describing how to do it. Check it out here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/charles_sterling/archive/200...

Goodbye Windows Server Longhorn

Hello Windows Server 2008. Looks like the TechNet France web site spilled the beans. Microsoft is officially naming the next version of Windows Server, "Windows Server 2008".

I personally am going to miss the Longhorn code name. It has treated us well. The code name, as I understand it, came from the fact that Server 2003/Windows XP codename was Whistler (a mountain in Canada with great skiing) and the follow up version was originally called Blackcomb (another mountain in Canada with great skiing). But the decision was made to create a version of Windows that was somewhere between the two. It just so happens there's a bar halfway between Whistler and Blackcomb called the Longhorn Bar. Thus the name.

What's going on with Windows Server Virtualization?

Windows Server Virtualization (WSV) is a pretty cool technology. The ability to transform farms of thousands of servers into a cabinet of hundreds of servers would save not only on energy costs but also provide a solution to make maintaining servers much easier.

So we were told that hardware virtualization is coming with Windows Server Longhorn. Then when it never appeared in any of the beta's we were told it would be available as a separate product released within 180 days of Longhorn's release. Today they are saying that the beta will come out with Longhorn's release. This timeline makes me think it's getting pushed into the Longhorn R2 release timeline. They also announced that they are cutting some features (hot swap hardware, 16 cores max, and live migration).

the feature that has me most worried is the 16 cores max. The reason that SP1 of Virtual Server 2005 R2 is being delayed is because they wanted to ensure that it could scale to 64 cores. If they aren't even going to support 64 cores in WSV how are they going to get it into SP1 of VS2005R2? This doesn't bother me because I have 2 cores on both of my servers running VS2005R2, but the reason this concerns me is that this is the type of thing that would cause Microsoft to not ship. Since shipping the product is the feature I'm most interested in at the moment this has me concerned.

It looks like for the time being that I'll have to continue using VS2005R2SP1. I was looking forward to switching to the beta of WSV. There are of course other alternatives. I've used VMWare in the past and I wasn't all that thrilled with being charged so much for it. This is especially true when it didn't even do what I wanted it to do. Then there's XenSource. This is open source, but I haven't been exposed to it. Did they get VHD support in there yet? I've invested a lot in VHD's as I have close to 1TB of them laying around I'd like to hang on to that technology.

Death to AJAX?

Lately there's been a slew of new technologies promising to kill AJAX once and for all. Those technologies include Silverlight, Flex, and JavaFX. The problem with this theory is that all three require the user to install a plug-in. You cannot expect that a user will have your plug-in installed, and you shouldn't expect the user to install your plug-in just because you tell them to.

Personally I dislike Flash web sites. They are slow and bulky and they ruin the bookmark/Forward/Back experience of the web browser. Now there's promise that one of these new technologies will take over your browser, well I wouldn't count on it.

I'll grant you that AJAX itself also breaks the bookmark/forward/back mechanism, but that's only when it's not used correctly. I think there is a danger that these new technologies will be used to build entire web sites (as this is what is what we were told we could do last week at Mix 07). They should be used to enhance web pages, but don't forget that visitors to your site want to be able to move around in a method that is familiar to them.

Mix07 Day 1 - Session 2

For the second session I decided to go to a talk titled, "Developing Data Driven Applications Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET." I should have known better than to go to this. Every time someone from Microsoft demonstrates the "power" of a grid control, detail control, or similar control they use the most trivial example and make the rest of us look like morons because our apps seem to require hundreds of lines of code to produce results. This was no different. Polita Paulus* demonstrated a way to build an entire data driven application with no code at all. Someone in the audience asked her about reality and what to do when you have business logic creating objects that you need to display in a grid of some sort. Her answer is along the lines of this, "Well we've been thinking about that, and let us know in the newsgroups if this is important to you. To do that you'd need to use Linq and we are going to explore that for the next version."

Now I know that you have to walk before you can run, but it seems like all of Microsoft's ASP.NET data controls have this problem. At least most of the ones in 2.0 can take an object exposing IEnumerable (so a generic collection would work here), but it's still frustrating when they claim that they'll do it in the next version when the history is that they won't do it, they'll expect someone like Infragistics or Telerik to do it.

Needless to say I wasn't very happy with their answers. Especially when they pointed us to their web site to download these controls. The controls are part of the ASP.NET Futures program. That means they are not productized, PSS doesn't support them, they may not be production level quality (read bugs may include performance and security, but we aren't responsible). Wait for the next version, what about getting the current version out before telling us to wait for another version.

*Polita Paulis was Polita Huff until recently. She seemed very happy in the fact that she was recently married and went to Fiji for her Honeymoon. She showed us pictures and video from it. It made for a good demo because it illustrated pictures and video as well as data, but really I feel like I know too much about her. Oh, and she's the Senior SDE who is responsible for bringing us the grid view, the detail view, etc.

You Just Can't Escape Silverlight V1.1

From the Silverlight V1.0 Beta SDK, "[The] Silverlight 1.0 Quick Starts - Implemented with Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, the quick starts provides an easy way for developers and designer to get up to speed on creating web experiences with Silverlight 1.1 Alpha."

Um... no. The Silverlight 1.0 Quick Starts should be implemented in Silverlight 1.0 and should get developers and designers up to speed on Silverlight 1.0 Beta.

Wow, if they are so in love with 1.1, why don't they dump 1.0 and just put all their effort into releasing 1.1?

Mix07 Day 1 - Session 3

Okay, for the Keynote and the first two sessions I learned stuff that I cannot use in my day-to-day programming because (and take your pick here):

1. It's not released yet
2. The version that will do what I need it to do is the next version after the one we are currently developing
3. I can't get away from .NET 1.1, what makes me think I can do something in 2.0 or 3.0 much less 3.5?

So, I decided to attend a talk that would actually be of some use, "Internet Sites with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007" also known as MOSS 2007. Tyler Butler started by showing us the new Hawaiian Airlines site which was built using MOSS2007. Very impressive. You should go take a look.

He then read a few slides from his PPT, and then tried to do a demo... but he couldn't get the projector to switch to his demo machine from his PPT machine. I paid how much to come to a conference to learn how to do my job better only to have the presenter unable to demo what he's talking about?

I would like to say that his hand waving and slide deck made up for the fact that there was no demo, but it's a little hard to understand the concepts when there wasn't even a single screen shot that we could look at.

In his credit he did tell people that they could come up after the Q&A session to see the demos. All in all MOSS2007 sounds like a great product, and a worthy successor to MCMS.

Mix07 Day 1 - Session 1

Building rich web experiences with Silverlight. This session was presented by Joe Stegman. Joe is an excellent presenter and I've attended many of his web casts including the Digital Black Belt series that helped prepare people for security issues with web site design. Joe was presenting Silverlight to us using the go-live loving beta of version 1.0. He made it clear that he would show us some of the stuff the Scott demonstrated in his keynote, only using the now-defunct-yet-not-released-yet version 1.0 of Silverlight.

Let me tell you, I can't wait for 1.1 to be released. The amount of JavaScript that he had to write to hook things up was a little confusing. I was actually disappointed that they continued with the XAML method of finding nodes (findName) and not the fairly standardized DOM (getElementById). But that's just a small thing and we'll all forget about it when version 1.1 is released.

Basically you include a script file and call a method to generate the Silverlight control. The Silverlight control is just a typical object tag with a type of "application/ag-plugin". For example:

<object type="application/ag-plugin">
  <param name="Source" value="somexaml.xaml" />
</object>

The script file and function you'd call would prevent IE from forcing the user to click to activate though, so you should just use that. That's all you need for Silverlight. Notice there's no requirement for adding a managed assembly to the GAC, no special web.config settings, and that's all because you don't need them. During the keynote Scott showed running a Silverlight page that pushed some video to the screen running from a web server and browser on a Mac. No Windows required.

Mix07 Day 1 - The Keynotes

Today was the first full day at Mix 07. It started this morning at 9:30 with a keynote address from Ray Ozzie who said this about following in Bill Gate's shadow, "There will never be another Bill Gates." Ray also gave the high level vision of what Silverlight really is. It isn't a Flash competitor, even though it will compete in that space. It's really the third wheel assisting apps that cannot decide if they are desktop applications or web applications.

Scott Guthrie came out and gave demo after demo of how this can be used. The demos were for companies such as CBS, MLB, and Netflix. You can see those parts of the keynote on the Mix07 site (www.visitmix.com).

One of the features that Scott made everyone excited about was the fact that Silverlight will include a .NET Framework to run on the client side. This is a cross browser, cross platform runtime that will run on the Mac. He then proceeded to do a demonstration of debugging client code running on a Mac from a PC. He went to the immediate window and changed the text that appeared on the Mac's browser. It was wicked cool.

I know, I'm as shocked as you that I wrote "Wicked Cool" but please bear with me I'm building up to something.

The demo's that he and the other speakers presented showed that Silverlight has the capability to be more than just flash. The demo called "Top Banana" which was a video mixing station in a browser was reported to weigh in at less than 50KB sent to the browser for the application (not counting the videos). Simply amazing...

but...

then it happened...

The version of Silverlight that they were showing off is the next version. I know what you are thinking because I was thinking it too. How can they have a next version when the current version isn't even released? All the cool stuff for Silverlight that goes above and beyond just being a Flash competitor is in version 1.1. Which they have released the Alpha of today. Version 1.0 is in beta, but it has a go-live license. Because of that, you will see some demo's on here for Silverlight. Hopefully soon.