It was a year ago when I took the stage at the Silverlight DevCamp in Chicago with my white MacBook and a beer in hand. I was set to talk about building MVC driven applications in Silverlight 1.0.
At the time I was working on a project for WWE and even though the project was secret, I got to show some of the tech we build behind the scenes for such project: A MVC approach to manage data visualization and an small framework to orchestrate its functionality.
My History with OS4SL = Aptana + FireBug + Blend
I started my career on Silverlight using Visual Studio and the Expression Studio, although in the middle of a development sprint a bug in the dev tools made me go shop for an alternative other than rebuild my dev machine… time was a constrain. I found Aptana and stick with it for the rest of my Silverlight 1.0 experience, Firebug did what it did for debugging of JS and Blend, well… let’s be honest, there is nothing like Blend for XAML authoring.
People was shocked to see me use open source technologies to build on Silverlight. Heck, I even got Larry Clarkin and Chris Bernard to twit about it (here and here). Things were good though.
Silverlight Dev Tools for Visual Studio have gone a long road since then and they are in a State of the Art sort of thing. Since those days Silverlight has embraced full support for the CLR and a mature architecture aroused from all those initial CTPs and long run Betas.
Delivering on a Promise for Better RIAs using .NET
Today Microsoft delivered on the Rich Internet Platform promise and made public its official release of Silverlight 2.0 along with a set of Open Source initiatives that not only will allow us access to a big set of controls source but also the ability to build Silverlight apps outside Visual Studio and even outside of the Windows Platform… now things are getting interesting in the RIA world.
Eclipse4SL
As part of this big announcement day, Microsoft made public its partnership with Soyatec, a French company that will take Eclipse up to support development of Silverlight applications, including C# editing support, a XAML WYSIWYG editor and debugging tools.
Such an effort goes by the name of Eclipse4SL and it’s first preview is available now for Windows. With support for other platforms coming along in the future.
Silverlight Control Pack
And finally to put the cherry in the pie, Microsoft will also be releasing a bunch of complex controls under the Silverlight Control Pack umbrella, also available is their source code which you can modify, rebuild and reuse.
The reason behind this is to not only provide better support for the already set of controls shipping with the runtime, but to serve as an example for the community on how controls should be build, setting a standard that both people and companies could take as reference point when building their own.
Exciting Times
Exciting times no less for the RIA world this next 5 weeks will be, with PDC just around the corner and with Adobe MAX following just right after with all the goodies from Flex and Flash 10, the ecosystem for better and greater experiences on the Web is nothing but starting… and I am thrill to be part of it!
So go ahead and get up to speed with the learning curve as there is be a lot to be digested in the weeks ahead.
Now ,that’s just another reason to give Aggiorno a try and get all those time consuming tasks we all go thru while web developing, automatically fixed. That way you can put that time to better use.
Cheers!
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