Do you know something about Silverlight performance on Macs?
I have to start developing a multiplatform application which has to run on PC and Mac, possibly on Linux also and I am researching different approaches to do it one time :).
By now my main option is SQL 2005, WCF and Silverlight.

Radu Poenaru
http://radupoenaru.wordpress.com/

Love the new stuff, but seeing that WinForms-like default styling for data forms kinda ruins the first impression imho.

Radu,
Check out inkubook.com - that's what we did and we love Mac users. Not sure where Moonlight's at, but it support Linux in theory for some subset of Silverlight.

Some of the validation and browser paging I remember from the PDC 2008. The error handling is nice, but you could have customized and written that already in Silverlight 2.

I am betting they release this at MIX 2009: SL 3 beta, Blend 3 Beta, VS 2010 support in Silverlight (with all the new templates), new Silverlight Control Toolkit iteration, Silverlight for Mobile, ASP.NET MVC RTW. I wrote about some of my predictions on my site...we'll see if I was right :)

Excellent! I've been looking forward to hearing about Silverlight 3's new features

@Radu & @Eric Willeke
Moonlight released 1.0 a couple of months ago, which is notable because in addition to being fully compatible with Silverlight1, the media pack has parity with Silverlight 2. The rest of Silverlight2 features like Controls, HTML DOM Bridge, etc are either alpha quality or in active development. If you get source from the Moonlight trunk, quite alot of features are working.

My company just released a LOB application in SL2. The feedback has been great. Customers' jaw dropped, literally - they thought they were looking at some Hollywood movie application mockup instead of a real application. Some commented the app is so beautiful that they have it up on their screen all the time and enjoy using it... So yes there is a lot that SL offers for LOB apps. Cant wait to migrate to SL3 when released!

Nasir,
Would it be Ok if you would share a screen-shot of that application? or does your company has an online demo or something where we could see some action? would be very interesting for others to get an understanding of how LOB could look with SL.
Rgds!

Florin N,

Its a TeleCommunication Management application mostly used internally by TelCo company personnel and has parts of it accessible by customer users. I'll check with the involved people at the company to see if I can post the images etc. I am really proud of it and definitely want others to see it too.

I hope people will not misuse Silverlight like Flash. Since its based on a very powerful framework, I expect sensible companies will create compelling LOB apps using Silverlight. The best part is it being cross platform with a bigger reach.

Another cool aspect of it is that LOB can look like whatever you wanted it to look like. You are not constrained by anything really. This is an Application Designers paradise. I can see lots of slots opening for app designers very soon in this industry. Besides solid underlying application framework, the thing that will differentiate your apps will be the front UX - and Silverlight takes care of that part!

I cannot agree more regarding the SL potential ... but let's see if MS will consider it as seriously for LOB as we 'still' do. I'm saying this because, for example, I cannot take this video too seriously - it only made me smile :) a LOB doesn't really need those things, and anyway every programmer could implement those features right now ... what every programmer cannot currently do is to fully support wsHttpBinding, to do SaveAs, to do Print, to a way to start the SL application offline, even if the Internet connection is down, etc, etc ... let's still be optimistic but if they will spend the time at MIX09 with such stuff like in the video, then I'd be quite disappointed :( and not only me, the army of people who've seen that the time has come for serious applications delivered over the web and MS guys are spending the time validating form fields :)

Honestly, and I posted this in few other places, I still can't understand why the MS guys did not implement from the very beginning full support for wsHttpBinding for example ... after all business applications creators are the biggest contributors to MS budget. Toys creators have already Flash :)

Florin, I have noticed and hate saying this that MS is more reactive then proactive. They'll throw out some technology and see if sticks, also it depends on their products PMs and marketig vision.

If there is enough interest in SL especially in LOB arena, and MS sees it, then they'll probably be more responsive to the dev community. But having said that SL is powerful enough and continues to improve. In our case we were able to roll out a fully capable LOB application without much effort, except a few glitches (aka SL bugs). Lets see where this goes... I am betting on SL big time, hope I am right.

Nice Video! really looking ahead for SL3.

@Florin N : Agree with you on some of the issues,even I was expecting some ReportViewer control kind of thing, from my little experience, Real business apps do need Reports, also wsHttpBinding-Integrating with WF etc still missing badly.would like to add MenuControl to wishlist also.

Any Architectural diff gonna be there in SL2 and SL3? since SL3 is now coming with 3D,Mobile support etc.

The video here has some interesting stuff in it - deep linking support is great, and needed to save us having to implement all that code. Grouping in the datagrid - fantastic! Details View, validation - interesting, will have to see how it's implemented - we need to implement validation on the server and client side though, so we may end up rolling a custom solution that we can use both sides without duplicating code anyhow. The error handling - I assume that's SL app errors only, and there's no new magic to handle SOAP faults and the browser hiding the HTTP codes?

This video didn't deal with communication with a WCF service at all though - I presume that's all coming at MIX ;)

I want to add my voice to the list of developers asking for wsHttpBinding, WF integration, SOAP Fault handling etc. (those three are top of our list though)

Like you Nasir, we're betting SL for LOB apps will be a killer - the initial internal reaction to our demos/prototypes has been similar to yours. In fact the problem I've got is because we were able to knock something up fairly quickly that looked fantastic, the expectation level is sky high :) However now that we're past the "ooh shiny" stage and are looking seriously at the nuts and bolts, we can see the issues others are also seeing.

In the end though I think we can devise solutions to solve these problems and produce SL LOB apps, but it would be nice to hear what the plan is for SL3 in terms of LOB features.

I await MIX with interest!

Any plans to do some of the things the guys at Gizmox are doing with Silverlight?

That's great, I never thought about business with Silverlight like that before.