I believe Silverlight within a year will be known as the “S” word, and we won’t be using it anywhere except in conversations about how painful Microsoft made that initiative. Let us say MS supports Silverlight for the next 10 years. That is great. But that means nothing to the customers I work with. Microsoft's poor communication over the past months built the coffin and BUILD put the nails in it when it was not even listed as a product. I lost a contract about 9 months or a year ago because of Bob M.'s comments, rebooted two Silverlight and one WPF project because of BUILD.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 9/16/11 7:12 PM

I believe Silverlight within a year will be known as the “S” word, and we won’t be using it anywhere except in conversations about how painful Microsoft made that initiative. Let us say MS supports Silverlight for the next 10 years. That is great. But that means nothing to the customers I work with. Microsoft's poor communication over the past months built the coffin and BUILD put the nails in it when it was not even listed as a product. I lost a contract about 9 months or a year ago because of Bob M.'s comments, rebooted two Silverlight and one WPF project because of BUILD.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 9/16/11 7:12 PM

Microsoft narrowly beat the Street on the revenue side but trounced any public expectations of its earnings when it reported its fiscal Q4 results Thursday. It earned $5.874 billion, up 30%, or 69 cents a share, up 35%, on a record $17.378 billion, up 8% year-over-year. The punters thought it would do 58 cents on $17.238 billion. Apparently the tax rate attributed to its net. Windows revenue declined 0.9% to $4.74 billion, and its operating income was off 4% at $2.943 billion, which Microsoft attributed to slow PC growth, which it reckons was down 2% in developed markets. It figured 40 million PCs went to emerging markets, where it fetches lower prices and experiences more piracy. Still sales are up there.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 7/23/11 6:00 PM

If you’ve been following my recent editorials, you’ll know I have some concerns with HTML5 as the silver bullet for all web / mobile development. As a result, I’ve been a proponent of rich GUI applications for both web and mobile. To that end, I’ve been supportive of adding Silverlight as a deployment target for PowerBuilder applications for web support. I also had been hopeful that Silverlight adoption on mobile devices would enable PowerBuilder to deploy to those devices as well. Recent indications are that although Silverlight may end up being a solution for web applications (and may even displace WPF for desktop applications), all indications are that few mobile devices will support it other than perhaps Windows Phone. If we are going to be able to develop for mobile devices with PowerBuilder, and we don’t believe that HTML5 is the only way to do that, what other options might we have?

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 7/7/11 7:00 PM

Microsoft is going to launch its cloud-ified Google Apps-targeting Office 365 that combines Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync in New York City on Tuesday June 28. The thing’s been in public beta for the last couple of months. Subscriptions are supposed to start at $6 a month per user. The event will be webcast at 10-11am EDT at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/office/online/Default.aspx . Microsoft’s cloud-lofted Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) hit the ground Wednesday for about three hours. Microsoft said on Twitter it was some kind of networking and hardware snafu in North America. It’s happened a number of times before. Folks’ll have to see if Office 365 is better.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 6/26/11 5:15 PM

The US Supreme Court Thursday ruled that Microsoft has to pay the $290 million patent infringement judgment awarded to little Toronto-based i4i two years ago after a Texas jury found that Word 2003 and 2007 willfully trod on its XML IP. Microsoft tried arguing that the bar for deciding whether a patent is invalid or not based on new evidence was set too high and that the district court judge in the i4i case should have instructed the jury to use the “preponderance of the evidence” rule rather than the “clear and convincing” evidence standard. The argument got a lot of backing from the high-tech industry – it filed a lot of support briefs in hopes of quashing some noisome patents, particularly troll patents – but it didn’t cut it at all for any of the justices.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 6/12/11 5:30 PM

This release provides many of the features of Enterprise Library 5.0 for Silverlight application developers. Silverlight Integration Pack for Enterprise Library is a collection of guidance and reusable application blocks designed to assist Silverlight application developers with common LOB development challenges. This release includes: Caching Application Block, Exception Handling Application Block, Logging Application Block, Policy Injection Application Block, Validation Application Block, and Unity Application Block.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 5/16/11 8:55 PM

This release provides many of the features of Enterprise Library 5.0 for Silverlight application developers. Silverlight Integration Pack for Enterprise Library is a collection of guidance and reusable application blocks designed to assist Silverlight application developers with common LOB development challenges. This release includes: Caching Application Block, Exception Handling Application Block, Logging Application Block, Policy Injection Application Block, Validation Application Block, and Unity Application Block.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 5/16/11 8:55 PM

Microsoft has posted the Microsoft Silverlight 5 Beta Offline Documentation. Below is an overview taken from the new documentation that outlines the new features covered in the documentation. Silverlight 5 Beta includes several new features that are based on customer suggestions. This topic introduces some of the new features and improvements in Silverlight 5 Beta.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 4/15/11 6:57 PM

Microsoft has posted the Microsoft Silverlight 5 Beta Offline Documentation. Below is an overview taken from the new documentation that outlines the new features covered in the documentation. Silverlight 5 Beta includes several new features that are based on customer suggestions. This topic introduces some of the new features and improvements in Silverlight 5 Beta.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 4/15/11 6:57 PM

This is a nice concise overview of all the topics related to development with Microsoft PRISM 4.0. It is not exactly the same content that is available for download. It is a trimmed down version of it. For example it does not cover upgrading from a previous version or go into the implementation details of the examples. It gives an overview and points you to the topic in the online MSDN documentation. Personally I would have preferred the content to have been included. The book starts out with an overview of PRISM terminology and the reasons for using PRISM (as well as the reasons not to). It then offers a chapter on each of the following topics- Initializing Prism Applications, Managing Dependencies Between Components, Modular Application Development, Implementing the MVVM Pattern, Advanced MVVM Scenarios, Composing the User Interface, Navigation, Communication Between Loosely Coupled Components, Sharing Code Between Silverlight and WPF, and Deploying Prism Applications.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 4/2/11 11:30 PM

This is a nice concise overview of all the topics related to development with Microsoft PRISM 4.0. It is not exactly the same content that is available for download. It is a trimmed down version of it. For example it does not cover upgrading from a previous version or go into the implementation details of the examples. It gives an overview and points you to the topic in the online MSDN documentation. Personally I would have preferred the content to have been included. The book starts out with an overview of PRISM terminology and the reasons for using PRISM (as well as the reasons not to). It then offers a chapter on each of the following topics- Initializing Prism Applications, Managing Dependencies Between Components, Modular Application Development, Implementing the MVVM Pattern, Advanced MVVM Scenarios, Composing the User Interface, Navigation, Communication Between Loosely Coupled Components, Sharing Code Between Silverlight and WPF, and Deploying Prism Applications.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 4/2/11 11:30 PM

Esri's new ArcGIS Viewer for Microsoft Silverlight can now be downloaded at no cost from the Esri Beta Community site. The viewer is a ready-to-use, configurable web mapping application built on ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF. Users can easily configure ArcGIS Viewer for Microsoft Silverlight without writing a single line of code or editing configuration files. The download includes an application builder tool for making and previewing changes to the viewer data content, tools, and layout. The viewer is designed so that users can customize the look and feel of applications, add and configure tools, and extend the viewer framework with custom add-ins.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 3/22/11 12:46 AM

Esri's new ArcGIS Viewer for Microsoft Silverlight can now be downloaded at no cost from the Esri Beta Community site. The viewer is a ready-to-use, configurable web mapping application built on ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF. Users can easily configure ArcGIS Viewer for Microsoft Silverlight without writing a single line of code or editing configuration files. The download includes an application builder tool for making and previewing changes to the viewer data content, tools, and layout. The viewer is designed so that users can customize the look and feel of applications, add and configure tools, and extend the viewer framework with custom add-ins.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 3/22/11 12:46 AM

This book is packed with great advice on how to build Silverlight applications correctly. It is an easy to read book, and will also make a great reference. This book is labeled as intermediate to advanced. I would agree with that listing. You won't find an overview of XAML in the book. The publisher has made Silverlight 2 Unleashed available for download and the book refers you to it for the basics. The author did do a good job of outlining the Silverlight 2 Unleashed chapters in the beginning of book, and pointing you to it where appropriate. Personally I would have preferred to have the chapters still considered relevant to have been updated and included. This would have made the book a beginners to advanced book. I have however seen complaints in reviews of other books that argue for the opposite. The other reviewers don't want material carried forward. I disagree and like everything in one place. This is just my personal opinion and I won't ding the book for it.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 3/1/11 1:15 PM

This book is packed with great advice on how to build Silverlight applications correctly. It is an easy to read book, and will also make a great reference. This book is labeled as intermediate to advanced. I would agree with that listing. You won't find an overview of XAML in the book. The publisher has made Silverlight 2 Unleashed available for download and the book refers you to it for the basics. The author did do a good job of outlining the Silverlight 2 Unleashed chapters in the beginning of book, and pointing you to it where appropriate. Personally I would have preferred to have the chapters still considered relevant to have been updated and included. This would have made the book a beginners to advanced book. I have however seen complaints in reviews of other books that argue for the opposite. The other reviewers don't want material carried forward. I disagree and like everything in one place. This is just my personal opinion and I won't ding the book for it.

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 3/1/11 1:15 PM

It was nice while it lasted. I received the email below this afternoon announcing a $35 charge will soon be in place. From this forum, it looks like Red-gate was hoping for a big pay day from Microsoft. Quote from the forum: "Right now I'm hoping MS wakes up to the importance of Reflector in .NET and realizes they have a severe gap in the SDK without Reflector. I hope they either acquire this software and include in the SDK or create something similar."

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silverlight.sys-con.com | 2/7/11 1:45 PM