Future of Silverlight

Last week I saw three interesting PDC presentations about Silverlight. So in this post I write about Silverlight future components and mobile edition of the technology.

PDC Silverlight sessions I've seen:

Microsoft Silverlight 2 for Mobile: Developing for Mobile Devices

Silverlight 2 for mobile supports .NET programming model. You don't need to change code of your Silverlight 2 application, but you can recognize displaying device (DeviceInformation class) to do some actions (for example making full-screen only for mobile devices). You can also use wrapper to recognize gestures.  Public CTP will be available  at Q1 during 2009. Excellent session with many practical demos! (at the end very interesting demo with ducks which depend on position of mobile phone).

Microsoft Silverlight Futures: Building Business Focused Applications

Second part of this session 'Futures'  is quite interesting. In the future Microsoft will add page navigation and frameworks for business applications (for example validation, authentication, business objects, data paging). Business Logic Framework will make building n-tier applications simpler. You should see practical demo with these new components. Team is also working on editable Visual Studio Silverlight designer, design time databinding support, core platform enhancements and many new controls.

Silverlight Controls Roadmap

 

This session is about Silverlight Toolkit (WPF controls: DockPanel, WrapPanel, TreeView, Expander, Label, ViewBox, HeaderedContentControl, HeaderedItemsControl + new controls:  AutoComplete, Charting, NumericUpDown + 6 themes with Implicit Style Manager). IMHO AutoComplete control is very useful and cool!  Silverlight Toolkit will be updated with new components ( Accordion, ListView) and many improvements (f.e charting, designer).  What's more - Microsoft thinks about making more new controls (MIX 2009 - MediaPlayer, TimePicker, Carousel, Rating, MaskedTextBox; in future: InPlaceEditing, AppoinmentCalendar, ImageMap, FileUpload, Menu, Slideshow).