About building .NET based application
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
From left; Leon Brown, User Experience and Designer Market manager; Yik Joon Ho, Regional Architect Evangelist; Angus Logan, Technical Product Manager for Windows Live. |
Microsoft has unveiled Silverlight 2, Expression and development aspects of the new Internet Explorer 8 at Remix SEA 2008, held recently in Bangkok with an emphasis on Microsoft's Software and Services strategy which will see Silverlight media served out of Microsoft's data centre as a service.
User Experience and Designer Market regional manager for Microsoft Leon Brown explained how Silverlight 2 was a tool to allow developers to re-create the whizz-bang flashy interface that developers saw online for applications within the company firewall, on the PC or on the mobile device. Today, the industry has both huge screens with high resolution and tiny screens on mobile devices and the same applications need to be fed to both extremes.
Brown, a former Adobe employee, said that Flash's approach started with what he called a cute animation package that grew and grew and many things that are bizarre today, such as the need to cram all the animation information into elements in the first frame.
Microsoft Expression takes a fresh approach and ties all this in, allowing the designer to create great graphics and to create an interface for applications or shells for video players.
Silverlight 1 was all about media and how to get media out to a PC or a Mac. Silverlight 2 is about building a compelling Internet application and using the .NET framework in the browser. Soon, with Novell's work on Silverlight for Linux, anyone trained in .NET will be able to run their Silverlight 2 applications on Linux as well as Windows Mobile and Symbian.
Silverlight is now part of Microsoft's Software Plus Services mantra with a new web site, silverlight.live.com. Microsoft has carved out a chunk of its data centre where Silverlight producers can upload their content to and serve it from Microsoft's content distribution network with 5TB a month of free bandwidth.
Some high-profile Silverlight sites today include the pro-surfing company Quicksilver and Hardrock Cafe'.
Angus Logan, Technical Product Manager for Windows Live explained how Live ID was different to the now defunct Microsoft Passport. Rather than a single sign-on, where Microsoft owned everything, Live was about leveraging the platform of relationships. For instance, with Live, if someone signed into Facebook, they could bring along all their relationships in Hotmail to Facebook rather than having to recreate everything with each new social application. He noted that there were now around 30 billion relationships on the Live platform that coulc now be leveraged. Microsoft is also encouraging third-party developers to create web sites that leverage components such as Live Messenger. The central idea is that the data and presence from Live will be pervasive across may web sites and applications.
"The dream of Passport was that everyone would have one credential and use it everywhere. Today we found that it wasn't an attainable dream and it wasn't the right place for us to be. So we did some technical changes and some business changes around licensing and how you can tap into it and renamed it Windows Live ID, the one central identity for all Microsoft online services.
"You can consume Live IDs with a low touch feel. You can become a relying party of Live ID or we can allows others to control," Logan said.
Some of the new features of Internet Explorer 8, which is now fully standards-compliant, include many security, stability and performance enhancements.
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