Preface: Silverlight and I once had a fruitful engagement; a tryst one might say. Through months of courting and excitement I was looking forward to committing myself fully...but then I was betrayed. The difficulty increased dramatically, and I was lost...with a simple love...now unrequited
Ah Crap, I am back into Silverlight
When Silverlight first came out I was stoked. I was beyond stoked; I was so damn excited that I decided to live the vector driven, xaml riding, angle-bracket lifestyle permanently. I got into it pretty thick for a while there and realized that the technology was rough; like, really rough. Granted, MSFT was doing everything that they could to produce videos, documentation, ease-ability, usability, and all of those fantastic buzz word-technologies for this platform. Needless to say, it still hurt.
The problem wasn’t in the art form, as that was freakin’ rockin (XAML is sweet, think vector drawing with code and what not). I liked the ability to put in animations with vector graphics and push things out on the page. But at the beginning, there wasn’t a lick of controls to speak of and the entire thing was JavaScript (not the wicked managed code thing that we have now). But since I have looked at it again, there are a myriad of new things that make the entire thing worth it and quite sexy:
1. Expression Blend 3 : This piece of technology looks robust-as-shit. There is a workflow and management that I didn’t think would be in a product that is only in its third revision (with a new product roll-out every six months it feels like)
2. Sketchflow in Blend 3: This software rocks because it allows you to put together a mockup for a website or an application in really no time at all, but the workflow is progressive. Whatever bullshit thing you put together can be then built upon and given to the clients as a final product. Actually, you know what makes this thing so awesome? The freakin fuzzy thumb principle. If you show a client a wicked sweet mockup of a site, he/she will say, “yeah, this is sweet, but I want the font in the corner to be comic-sans because I am a graphical genius with mad typography skills.” Like a good dev you will drop your head and make the change in shame. BUT, if you just want the client to bless off on your design while still letting them “contribute” you need to make something purposefully wrong; personally, I like to put a blurred picture of a thumb in some image on the page and have the client say, “great picture, but could you remove that thumb, it doesn’t look right.” And although nothing really happened, the client feels great for contributing. How does this all tie into Sketchflow? Well with Sketchflow you can give them a mocked up version of your site that PURPOSEFULLY looks sketched so that the client/users are happy to comment on the USE of the software and the applicable FUNCTIONALITY, and not so much the “look” of the product.
3. New frameworks: Some frameworks have showed up over the years, looking to be the defining factor between a difficult platform to build upon and an easy development experience. These frameworks all leverage some well known patterns, like MVVM and the command pattern. These frameworks are from Patterns and Practices (Prism v2), as well as from the Redmond dev group headed by Brad Abrams that wrote .NET RIA Services (oh yeah, RIA == Rich Internet Applications. Because that is really obvious).
So once again, I am back on the Silverlight bandwagon and hoping to get some quality learning and development in. The time will be an issue as the time is always an issue, but maybe, just maybe, with a little bit o-luck I will be able to write an app that I am excited about with this newfound-cool technology.