Offline Silverlight
Posted by siegem on March 4, 2008
That’s nice to know from Ryan Stewart that Microsoft would want to make Silverlight work offline, something may come in the MIX convention next week, or not. It’s good for developers to have a broad list of technologies to choose when creating some application, specially one as good as silverlight.
Silverlight is a browser plugin that let developers create rich internet applications using any .NET language. It make possible to develop using animations, sound and data access, dynamically loading XML data into the application and manipulating it with DOM interface. The control of XML content on Silverlight is similar to the way it’s done in Ajax, but it seems that is a lot faster if compared to the JavaScript way, as Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch. Take a look on the previous link to know more about Silverlight.
It seems that Microsoft want to compete with Adobe on creating RIAs that can be accessible on the desktop, like the AIR runtime environment. There’s a controversial point here where some people consider Silverlight more like Flash than the technology applied on Flex and integrated with AIR. I believe that the two are nice platforms and have their own strengths, but I only tested Flex until now, maybe I will play with Silverlight a little to know it better.
What do you think? Can Silverlight be as good as AIR, or it can’t be compared.
