UPDATE: Michael has posted a comment here and offered himself up to the gauntlet and apologized for his article.  He writes below:

Tim did me a favor with this article, and his comments on Connected Internet. I have left the article up on Connected, because frankly, I deserve the lumps I get over it.

Anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes talking with me, reading this blog, or listening to me on podcasts (Herding Code, Thirsty Developer, Misfit Geek) will know that I LOVE Microsoft.  I’m not ashamed to admit it and I’m not ashamed about my passion for the company or technology it produces.  I’m also not afraid to admit when and where we suck.  I don’t use every Microsoft product…if there are ones that I feel are better for how I use them, then I pick the better tools/technology.  There, bias stated.

I also think that I’m a fair person when it comes to comparisons and reviews and answering questions about competition, etc.  I welcome those conversations.  When I participate in them I do my best to be informed or point out where I’m not informed.  When not informed I try not to make definitive opinions until I have been informed by research or in trying it out for myself.

So you could imagine (like others) that I get frustrated when I see, hear, read things based on bad information, and what seems like no research has been done.  I’ve got thick skin, can usually comment and brush it off.  But today I read something that just triggered a twitch response in me that is making me reply.  It isn’t because of this post only, but because others have written articles on Silverlight that have used the same ill-informed bias.  The one that got me today was from Michael Lankton written for Connected Internet titled 10 Reasons Why Flash is Better than Silverlight.  Michael’s bio talks about him being an AV enthusiast and a corrections officer.  It briefly talks about him having ‘some coder and sysadmin in his history’ – here’s the full bio:

About the Author: Michael was a bass player in a hardcore punk band in the 80's and spent the 90's building and riding custom Harleys. As strange a combination as it may seem, Mike also has some coder and sysadmin in his history as well. At 43 Mike's now a husband and dad, and works as a Corrections Officer in a maximum security lockdown unit by day, and is admin at AV Enthusiast and contributor to Connected Internet when time allows. Mike is also passionate about food and travel.

So, bravo for Connected Internet for picking someone acutely aware of the landscape of the RIA space to do this comparison.  Oh wait.

A few people have commented on the post and JC being first had a lot of good points, refuting most of the bad information but Michael hasn’t corrected anything (despite saying so).  I’ve posted a comment offering to provide accurate information for him (and I’ll extend to anyone) in doing an evaluation.  You should be informed about the capabilities before doing things like this.  In that spirit, since there are some common misconceptions noted in Michael’s post that are incorrect, I had a moment of thought to note them (which others have already added their comments as well).

Michael’s intro paragraph says “you have better options for embedding video and audio content into a web page” than Flash or Silverlight.  Really?  Is this the wondrous HTML5 you speak of?  That isn’t complete, only supported in certain versions of browsers and requires likely a different encoding of the media than you already have?  Yeah, thought so.  Let’s be honest.  Flash and Silverlight are *the* ways to leverage media in mainstream applications today.  Are there alternatives?  Sure.  Are they more pervasive?  No.  On to the article after this little intro correction now.

1. Platform compatibility. 

MYTH: Michael notes the platform where we are supported and on Mac says “only just recently too.” 
FACT: Silverlight has been supported on Mac platforms since it’s incarnation.  The current managed code versions are supported on Intel-based Macs only.  A simple check of the system requirements would have found this.

In the comments Michael states that what he meant by this is that .NET is required.  We’ll get to that in point 9.

MYTH: Windows servers are required for Silverlight.
FACT: You could serve up Silverlight from your Samba share if you want.  Silverlight is a client technology…we don’t care what is on the server.  The only thing we require (for security) is that the XAP must be served with the right content MIME type (application/x-silverlight-app).  That’s it.  And every web server out there can have this MIME type.

2. Market penetration.

Our latest install statistics we see from our downloads, etc. as announced at MIX09 put us around 1/3 market penetration.  This is continuing to grow.  I honestly don’t have daily visibility to this number to give you current stats.  Michael makes a note “Not sure about that, as some independent studies show it as low as 6%” – um, cite the study?  If not, that’s a blatant assumption.  Heck even the much disputed riastats.com shows penetration at 34%.  Again, cite the source, or move along.  I even cite riastats.com here, although that’s not the benchmark that Microsoft uses…but at least I’m citing where I pull the number from (the 34% number, not the 1/3).

3. 64-bit web browser support. 

It’s funny that in the comments Michael says to a commenter not to talk about beta technologies, yet in this point here that’s all the evidence he has: An alpha of Flash for 64-bit.  Silverlight doesn’t have a 64-bit plugin.  Neither does Flash.  Enough said.

4. Supported image formats.

I couldn’t find a definitive source on what image formats Flash officially supports with no extensibility, but I think it is JPG, PNG and GIF (someone cite a source if you have better data).  True, Silverlight doesn’t support GIF.  I’m not upset about it.  Guess what though…we have an extensible platform and if you absolutely need to support your GIFs from 1997, you can.

5. Package Delivery.

MYTH: Silverlight files are loose and uncompressed.
FACT: Silverlight files are packaged into a XAP file which is a standard compressed/archive format.

In fact, just rename to .zip and use your favorite tool to see the contents.  If you think your favorite tool can get even better compression…feel free to recompress again.  We think we have decent improved compression. 

Oh and we also support cached assemblies, partitioning applications, and other techniques to minimize the size of your application base file.  This point tells me he’s evaluating on Silverlight 1.0 (which didn’t leverage the XAP package and was in fact loose files – which could be gzip/deflate compressed by the server btw).

6. Audio.

MYTH: Silverlight does not support APIs for generating and controlling audio.
FACT: Silverlight has a MediaElement control for controlling audio/video, MediaStreamSource API for providing your own decode/logic and APIs for RAW audio, video stream. 

Again, do your research.  Samples available for this here (extensible media format support sample) and here.

7.  Portability.

I’m not sure his description of Flash’s abilities here are even accurate.  I *think* he may be talking about just running a SWF file using the standalone Flash player, but I wonder if he also means AIR here as well.  I’m just not sure (and he doesn’t indicate).  Silverlight has the capability to run out-of-browser.  Is it a full-trust application like AIR?  No.  But again, he doesn’t clarify here what he’s referring to.  Sure Flash has a standalone player, but I can’t remember the last time I played only a SWF.  If referring to AIR, there are some comparisons that could be drawn, but bottom line is you can run Silverlight applications out of the browser.

8.  Accessibility.

MYTH: Silverlight is not an accessible technology.
FACT: Silverlight can be developed with accessibility in mind.

Michael points out “changing color schemes” and I think is referring to high-contrast mode.  Yes we have that.  But we also have caption support for media files and have the ability to integrate with other accessible technologies.  Here’s some resources:

• Accessible Media Project (full open source implementation of an accessible media player).  Note: that this is built upon *existing* APIs that are built-in to the product.
• Accessibility in Silverlight with Mark Rideout here and here.
• Buttercup Reader – an implementation of an accessible application in Silverlight.

9.  Client-server communication.

MYTH: You must use .NET server technologies for service communication on Silverlight.
FACT: Silverlight can communicate with ASP.NET web services, WCF, SOAP services and REST APIs. ASP.NET on the server is not required for client-server communication.

Michael’s assertion here is simply incorrect.  Silverlight has a network stack available to developers to communicate with servers/services of all kinds and also includes a Socket implementation if you so desire.  This is just completely false what Michael notes here.

There are some technologies we are developing (.NET RIA Services) that do require .NET on the server and provide a better experience for developers using Microsoft technologies front-to-back.  This, however, is not a requirement of Silverlight.  Use your Ruby REST api if you’d like.

10.  3D rendering.

I’m definitely not an expert in 3D.  I have to admit I don’t know the capabilities of Flash in this regard.  Silverlight does, however, support perspective 3D (taking a 2D object and putting it in 3D space).  Do we have full on support for 3D meshes, etc.  No, we don’t right now.  I *think* (again, Flashers correct me if I’m wrong) that Flash’s implementation is similar based on some quick search research.  I’m willing to admit I’m wrong here on their implementation.

We do have several ways to extend 3D type models though:

• Kit3D – an open source 3D graphics engine for Silverlight.
• Balder – a managed game engine with 2D and 3D support.
• Zam3D – a commercial product for exporting 3D environments to XAML

As for game development.  Sigh.  Yes it can be done.  In fact how about a platform that lets you reuse technology to develop a game for desktop, browser, XBOX and Zune?  Check out Silver Arcade for some casual games that people are developing.  We’ve also got a thriving ecosystem around physics engines that are open source as well!  Casual games not your thing?  How about Quake in Silverlight?

Michael ends his article with these words (emphasis mine):

I have a platform to express my opinions, and they are generally backed up with solid experience or data to justify them. I am not always right, and I welcome anyone who disagrees with my thoughts on Microsoft’s Silverlight to begin that discussion in the comments section.

Michael – you have been engaged in the comment section and haven’t corrected where you are wrong.  Your opinion, this time, is not backed up with solid experience or data.  Period.

When Silverlight 3 launched, we also published several additional application themes for the navigation and business application (for .NET RIA Services) templates.  I just uploaded two more themes from one of our designers, Corrina, to the Expression Gallery.  There are versions for both navigation application template as well as the .NET RIA Services business application template.

Mediterranean Sun (RIA Services):

Seeing Sound (RIA Services):

Additionally, several fixes were made to the existing templates that some users reported.  I also added .NET RIA Services templates for those that were missing based on requests (Retro, Skyline, Subdued).

I noticed also that others have been uploading themes, behaviors and other goodness to the Expression Gallery, so be sure to check it out!

I have the pleasure of being invited to participate in two Silverlight events coming up soon (one very soon).  These are a part of a “firestarter” event that is intended to get you familiar with certain technologies, in this case Silverlight, rather quickly and gain a better understanding for the overall platform offerings.  I’m excited to have been invited to participate in both the Atlanta and Seattle events.

Silverlight Firestarter Atlanta

The first one will be in Atlanta, Georgia on 22-August!  It’s been quite some time since I’ve been to Atlanta and I’m very happy to be going to hang out with Silverlight developers there.

The agenda looks to be a good one if you are in the area.  It is a free event to attend and will be hosted at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta.  Apparently it is already booked full for registration.  You can find out more information about the plans, location, and schedule at the minisite.  Be sure to check out the Bios section to see the star studded experts that will be there!  Wildermuth said that he’d take me to the largest aquarium…I’m hoping that’s not a ploy to get me eaten by some giant whale shark or something.  I’ll settle for BBQ if we can’t make it to the aquarium Shawn!

Silverlight Firestarter Seattle

Well, technically Redmond, but who’s counting :-).  This event on 17-September will be held at the conference center on the Microsoft campus.  Registration is required, so make sure you register now if you plan on attending.

This is a pretty packed agenda with some great folks, including Scott Guthrie, Brad Abrams, Adam Kinney, Justin Angel and Karl Shifflett.  I’m honored that Scott would open up for me ;-).  Seriously though, this looks like it will be a good time!  Adam posted his vision on how the day will go.  I better start working on those loads!  Again, registration is required, so make sure you go do that now.

Hope to see you at one of these!

One of the features that a lot of developers seem to enjoy is the out-of-browser feature in Silverlight.  This is the feature that allows you to take your Silverlight application and run it like a desktop application (without some of the trust levels right now).  If you aren’t familiar with the feature, take a moment and familiarize yourself with it…here’s some info:

• Silverlight 3 Out of Browser developer APIs
• Sample Application
• Feature overview (from the PM that owns the feature)

Now that you have some basis of understanding, allow me to share a thought I’ve had.  I’m seeing a few people wanting to force the out-of-browser (OOB) experience.  That is to say, they want their application to be only run in OOB mode. 

NOTE: If you feel you want this, you should understand the limitations in OOB mode.  Namely the HTML bridge features and certain network implications might affect your applications depending on your needs.

Honestly I am not sure I entirely see the value in that (forcing it), so if you have one, please enlighten me (maybe gaming I suppose).  After all, IsolatedStorage is shared between OOB and in-browser Silverlight applications from the same source.  But I digress. 

The Problem

One thing that I’ve seen is folks asking for a method on how they can force the OOB mode in their app.  One of the security features of OOB is that the Install action must be user initiated.  This means it must be from the end-user action…not automated.  So you can’t just send a URL to someone and have it suddenly install the application OOB.  So how would you go about this?

A Solution

Easy, I think.  Here’s the pattern that I think might work.  I’ll note that this is just my opinion of a solution…not the defacto in all situations.  By all means please consider your own scenario needs before blindly adopting.  That being said, I think it might be helpful to explore.  This solution involves leveraging the OOB APIs available to the developer and creating some different views in your application.

Step 1: Create some views

What you’ll need here really is two views (for lack of a better term at this point – if you want to call them controls, that is fine too) in addition to your main application.  I’ve called one Installer and the other Installed.  The purpose of Installer is that this will be the view shown when a user does not have the application installed OOB.  The purpose of Installed is that it will be the view shown when a user does have the OOB application installed *and* is attempting to view the application in-browser.  The third “view,” your application, is what will be rendered when the user views the OOB application.  Put Installer and Installed wherever you’d like in your app.  I created a folder called Views and stuck them there. 

For Installer, you’ll want to put some UI in here for the Installer “badge.”  I highly recommend putting some time into this using Expression Blend to make it all look great and perhaps add any visual states you may want.  Remember, this is your user’s first impression.  This is still a Silverlight application, so go nuts with styling and using controls.  But you don’t need to make these the same size as your application.  For my example, my OOB application is 800x600, but my Installer app is only 300x162.  This Installer control/view will contain your actual install logic.  So somewhere here you need to have a button or something that the user can initiate as an action that you can call the Install method.  A button is easiest and easy to style.  In the Click event all you have to do (in simplest form, of course you’d want to add some error handling) is add the API call to install:

   1: Application.Current.Install();

For Installed, you’ll do the same thing, except make the UI/UX for the experience of letting someone know they already have it installed.  This could be something as simple as a text message, or complete instructions, etc., whatever.  You decide.

When you are done with this step you should have two XAML UserControls: Installer.xaml and Installed.xaml both for their specific purpose.

Step 2: Wire up the application startup logic

What I’ve chosen to do is take control of the App_Startup logic to determine the state.  I felt it would be better here based on the scenario I’m trying to accomplish rather than to load a default UserControl and have to do some funky app logic to swap out the RootVisual.  What I’ve chosen to do is to check the state of the trigger to run and follow some logic:

• If the app is installed and the user is running in-browser: Show Installed
• If the app is not installed and the user running in-browser: Show Installer
• Else: Show App

The logic finds the correct state in a simple if…elseif…else statement and decides which RootVisual to show.  Here’s the complete code:

   1: private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)

   2: {

   3:     if ((App.Current.InstallState == InstallState.Installed) && (!App.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser))

   4:     {

   5:         this.RootVisual = new Installed();

   6:     }

   7:     else if (!App.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser)

   8:     {

   9:         this.RootVisual = new Installer();

  10:     }

  11:     else

  12:     {

  13:         this.RootVisual = new MainPage();

  14:     }

  15: }

Simple, isn’t it?  You can see that the “app” that gets run is the correct starting point given the state.

Step 3: Configure your OOB settings

Visual Studio 2008 adds a dialog feature for you to easily generate the OOB settings.  You can read more about that here and see some screenshots: Silverlight Out-of-browser Settings Dialog.  Once you’ve done this, when you compile your application it enables it for OOB install capabilities.

Step 4: Deploy

That’s really it.  Of course the harder part is your own application :-), but that’s for you to figure out, not me.  In the end you could then embed your application somewhere within a web page.  It will show your Installer if the user doesn’t have it, or remind them it’s already installed if they do.  Here’s a working example based on this pattern (Silverlight 3 required to run this application):

This is just a stub example app, no working functionality in the main application.  The purpose is just to show this pattern.  As you can see, when the application runs, it runs at the desired 800x600 application width that I want for my actual application, game, whatever.  All this while I minimize the impact visually to show the messages of the Installer and the Installed controls.

Summary

This is just a sample pattern that you may want to implement if the need (or desire) is there to force your applications to be run OOB.  Again, OOB in general should be understood before blindly going in and assuming 100% of what you have will run in this mode.  But if it will and this is something you want, you may consider using this pattern to make a smaller visual impact on the installer and providing the end user with a better user experience to get it installed.  Or at least it was an experiment for me.

Hope this helps!

I was messing around with a new internal application the other day and made a wise crack about some of the features out in the open.  And by wise-crack, I mean ‘feedback in the nicest way possible’ of course.  On one of my suggestions someone pointed out a RTFM moment that the feature was actually in there but had a dependency.  The feature I was requesting was “toast” notifications.

What is “toast”?  Aside from a delicious breakfast treat, it’s a term that most people refer to those little notification windows that popup from applications in the Windows system tray.  Sometimes annoying, mostly useful (depending on how many notifications you get of course). 

examples of “toast” notifications

If you are a Windows programmer, there are APIs you can directly tap into to trigger these things in the standard notification bubbles provided by Windows.  If you are a web programmer though, it would be a challenge to bubble up a message to the native client from a web page with ease.  You could if you wanted though, as Windows provides a standard method for any application to opt-in to using.

OSX users have the same feature (global notification system), but I’m assuming it isn’t easy to use, which is why Growl exists.  It is an application itself that allows a developer to send a notification message to it.  It is user configurable (meaning I, the user, define what my notifications look like and when), but serves as a platform for OSX app developers to leverage and provide the user with a consistent notification platform.  Growl is not a part of OSX though and still requires to be there.

Back to my internal app feedback.  This application made use of something I wasn’t aware of – Growl for Windows.  It’s basically a Windows port of the Growl framework.  Interesting I thought.  I wondered why this application developer of our internal app didn’t just use the native Windows notification system, but I digress.  I started looking around and saw that they have it enabled for web applications to use it.  Cool!  Of course the dependency is still required (i.e., it must be installed), but if it is there, you can use it!  Now, there are others that emulate this type of thing like jQuery Growl for web applications.  These frameworks, however, show notifications in your application and not in your operating system.  So if your web app was minimized you wouldn’t see the notification.

I got curious and saw they had a Javascript library to use…hmmm…Silverlight notifications.  So I busted out a quick sample application for Silverlight that provides notifications through the Growl framework.  Here’s a quick video of my efforts with me explaining a bit:

So what you have is multiple parts.  First, it will only work if Growl for Windows is installed, so if you want to play around, install it.  Second there is the Growl.js library of the framework.  This would be in your web application hosting your Silverlight app.  That’s really all you need.  Now you can expose some Javascript functions to call the library.  I created a generic one called NotifyGrowl which takes a title and content.  This is very generic and uses a single notification type.  Growl let’s you configure notification types to segment your messages a bit and allow your user to customize them like a different UI for error types versus warning types.

It’s pretty cool and interesting to play around with.  Now for the things I don’t like…

Flash – It feels just a little dumb to be using a Flash component in a Silverlight application.  In fact that’s what is happening here.  The JavaScript API for the framework, really is a JavaScript API to a Flash application.  When you initialize the Growl API in JavaScript, you are creating a SWF dynamically that you are then communicating to in later calls.  It works, and works well, but it just feels wonky.

HTML Bridging – Hence the name of JavaScript implies that you’re using some HTML bridge activity to call from Silverlight into the API.  While this is incredibly easy (you can learn how to do this here: <>), it will only work in-browser at the moment.  I think the real power of notifications could be in the out-of-browser applications.  Unfortunately, the HTML bridge isn’t available in OOB right now.

Dependency – This is obvious.  While it is cool, it relies on Growl for Windows being installed.  Are you going to ask your users to install two things?

Not common Growl – The API I played around with wouldn’t trigger Growl on OSX.  That kinda sucks.  I thought it would which is why I started messing around.  I figured you’d be able to write to an API that both platforms subscribe to, but it isn’t the case.

The Growl for Windows project does have a .NET library, so why would I use the JavaScript/Flash one?  Well, the Growl system relies on socket communication so in theory, Silverlight should be able to use it.  Right now, however, Silverlight has restricted port ranges for socket communication.  Those port ranges don’t fall in line with the current accepted range for Growl messages.  In theory (and I’ve asked the developer about this) you should be able to forward messages back/forth.  An experiment for another time perhaps.  Right now the developers of Growl for Windows operate using the Growl Notification Transport Protocol (GNTP) but the Mac/OSX version of Growl does not yet.  Apparently the Mac/OSX developers have pledged to work on this. 

It was a fun experiment to play around with and see how a Silverlight/browser application could provide OS-wide notifications if a framework existed.

What do you think…would you like a “toast” navigation API in the Silverlight runtime for you to use?  What features would you expect that feature to have?