BangaloreFx: Silverlight Meeting Report

Friday’s Bangalore Flex User Group meeting was a lot of fun. We had Pandurang Nayak and Supreet Singh from Microsoft over to Introduce Silverlight to the group.

The meeting started off with Supreet, who is a very experienced designer, talking about Microsoft’s User Experience Platform and the history of how Silverlight came into being. Pandurang soon took over form Supreet as the room was full of developers and we were more interested in the geek talk.

Pandurang started off by showing some cool demos built in Silverlight followed by an explanation of the designer developer workflow while building for Silverlight or WPF. Then he showed us how to build a simple Silverlight app with Expression Blend and Visual Studio. He has a nice write up the things he showed on his blog, check it out.

I would like to extend a special thanks to Pandurang and Supreet for sharing with us and Esberi Technologies for sponsoring the excellent venue .

My main intended take-out from the session was a list of scenarios when I would want to use Silverlight to build an RIA, given that I am well versed with Flex/Flash/AS3/AIR and I am reasonably comfortable in programming in C# as well. I couldn’t come to any concrete conclusions but here are a few things I’ve been thinking about …

DeepZoom

DeepZoom is the single most important reason why I would build a Silverlight app. This kind of technology is just not available on the flash player and the kind of experiences this can offer is simply amazing. The Hard Rock Memorabilia site is awesome !!.

Performance

This was a hot topic of discussion both during and after the meeting. To me the performance of an RIA runtime has three important elements:

1. How fast can the player calculate, i.e hard core number crunching .. some argue that because of the CLR, the Silverlight player may be faster at numbers than the flash player, I will have to see some benchmark tests before I concur.

2. How fast can the player render, there is some evidence that Silverlight 1.1 was performing better than the flash player, we still have to see tests for the latest Flash and Silverlight players.

3. How well can the player render, i.e how good does the final output looks. Lets face it, one of the biggest reasons for anyone to invest in an RIA is the richness, the wow, the look and feel .. all of which adds to the overall experience of the user. In my opinion Silverlight player’s rendering quality is not up to par with Flash player’s rendering quality. This is the main reason I shelved Silverlight 1.0 when it was released and this continues to be the reason I still prefer the Flash Platform over Silverlight 2 for building RIAs. I had mentioned this point during the meeting, here is a video recording of Microsoft.com’s Silverlight page, where I’ve zoomed in a little bit to explain what I mean. Microsoft has been open about agreeing that their font rendering is not up to the mark and they are working on it, but I feel that they need to work on Silverlight’s overall visual rendering. The rendering is not crisp, edges are jagged especially when things are moved, gradients are not smooth etc. etc. I am pointing to just one example but I have noticed such inferior quality is several Silverlight apps and I plan on writing a detailed post pointing to many more examples.

The above are a few of the things I’ve been thinking about but the decision of which technology to use always depends on several factors, the above are just a few observations.

All in all it was a excellent evening I learned a lot and met some very interesting people. I tried recording the whole evening on video on my phone but this was my first time recording like this I messed up, There are two long clips, one has no audio and the other is too jerky .. sorry guys I’ll try and do a better job next time, meanwhile check out the pictures that Prakash took.

If you have any feedback for the meeting please take a minute to fill this survey.