On my way back from the Mix conference in Vegas I was trying to get one of my WPF/E applications to run on the new Silverlight 1.1alpha. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be because a lot seems to have changed. I finally figured it out after reading Bryant Likes's blog. He already figured it out and shared the solution (Thanks Bryant!):
If you want to go the "real" route of working with Silverlight 1.1alpha, here's what you need:
I saw two really good sessions on Silverlight and .NET this morning. They are online now, and I really recommend that you watch them:
One of the really neat things are that Silverlight also supports LINQ in the client browser. Part 2 shows a cool example on that and how easy it makes it to work with data. Furthermore you can easily communicate between Browser DOM, Javascript and .NET assembly code which makes for some interesting scenarios. Since .NET excution is 400-1000 times faster than JavaScript, you could have your heavy algorithms inside silverlight, and call them from Javascript. If you don't need the presentation-layer, you could just hide it and have it as a library you utilize from JS.
So what is the main differences between v1.0 and v1.1? v1.1 contains:
- Everything from v1.0
- A subset of the .NET 3.5 framework and some extra browser and AJAX specific classes
- XAML extensibility
- Control class (for user controls)
- Sample controls
Currently Silverlight works with Safari, Firefox and IE on both Mac and Windows and soon to be Opera as well. I asked them whether they would also support other platforms like Linux. Basically they didn't have any 'issues' with making that, but were currently not considering it until there is a larger demand for it.
Update: Mono has already announced that they will make sure we get Silverlight support on Linux. COOL!