Silverlight for Business

Bart Czernicki had good post recently titled Silverlight 3 - Where is Silverlight Mobile?

I thought a lot of the comments he made were spot on.  We have been lead up the garden path by the mobile team and in particular Amrit Chopra who has been announcing Silverlight for Mobile for 3 years now.  In fact I was expecting that he would announce it again at Mix year and then deliver nothing again!  Turns out he took a back seat in the 6.5 overview instead and no significant news on Silverlight Mobile was forthcoming.

In my opinion though, Microsoft are playing with smoke and mirrors because they want to make a big as splash as possible when Windows Mobile 7 arrives.  I think they are concerned that whatever they have up their sleeve for mobile will be leaked (in fact I have heard two evangelists say as much), but I think we can take a good guess at what will be in Windows Mobile 7 (or could it even by 6.5 - wishful thinking perhaps, but I thought the comments about silverlight “missing the window” for 6.5 at 54mins in this presentation sounded vague at best, and there was the tweet on the right (since deleted) from the windowsmobile team)

So what will be in the next version of Windows Mobile?

Note: By saying “next version” I am adopting the same language that Microsoft seem to be using – could be 7, could be 6.5, could be 7 in 6.5 timeframe…but I am referring to the next significant release.

My guesses:

• Silverlight (obviously) - but will it be browser only or the whole environment in a wpf kind of way?  My bet it will be the whole environment with xaml everywhere.  This is why they hint about it not being Flash Lite and why at the end of the Mix 09 presentation when the question was asked (55:45mins) “Silverlight will bring xaml to Windows Mobile, would that make xaml a first class citizen for use on Windows Mobile” was met with an emphatic “We agree” from Loke Uui Tan
• IE8 - Loke Uei Tan said in the mix presentation no plans for 6.5 but definitely for the next release
• Cloud Services integration – We have the My Phone service now, and a client for Live Mesh but I predict that we will have much more in this space.  This video gives a sneak peak of some of that vision, and this page takes about how “Through the combination of Windows, Windows Live and Windows Mobile, Microsoft is delivering the platforms, tools, infrastructure and solutions to enable new kinds of applications and services that extend from the server, to the datacenter, to the cloud – and from the browser, to the PC, to the phone and beyond.”
• Multi-touch – as Bart mentions – the multi-touch support in Silverlight 3 could be primarily for Windows Mobile
• Accelerometer functionality with gestures for the interface 
• Zune integration – this story goes back and forth – my bet is that Zune type functionality will be built in and this will also be the first time that is officially available outside the US.
• Marketplace: Games & Xbox 360 integration of some sort – again this would seem like a natural fit – I have heard nothing about this, apart from comments about marketplace, and we do of course have Windows Mobile Marketplace announced for Windows Mobile 6.5 (and a recent announcement on free updated listings for developers) 

Add all that up and it is looking pretty exciting from a user and a developer story.  Let’s hope it is sooner rather than later.

Cheers

Ian

Unfortunately the Silverlight UK User Group meeting was cancelled last night, because Mark Mann injured his ankle – I understand he is recuperating though (http://twitter.com/mark_mann) – hope it gets better soon Mark :-)

I was due to do a Grok on SilverlightPulse.net and my presentation is below.  Mark has also asked me  to do a more in-depth talk on this and it’s current migration to Silverlight 3 beta in a forthcoming meeting, which I am looking forward to.  Stay tuned (as they say)

Cheers

Ian

I have updated the app I created for keeping track of Silverlight tweets and now hosted it on http://silverlightpulse.net (DNS changes have just been made so may to a few hours to propagate to you).  So far I have had an overwhelming positive response, so thanks everyone who has taken a look.

Changes include:

• Much better logic in summarising the data in the chart
• Some animation (woot! – of course any designers who would like to add their love, please get in touch ;-)
• Manual Refresh and countdown to next auto refresh
• Gets all tweets in the past 8 hours (previous version just got the last 99 tweets)

I have plenty of other ideas for this app, so stay tuned, but even in it’s current form I think it will be interesting to see how the Twitter world lights up (or not) for the SL announcements at Mix 09 this week.

Cheers

Ian

Just a quick note to point you towards a little app I have been playing with to keep track of Silverlight news on Twitter.  Thought it might be interesting to keep an eye on this week with all the Silverlight announcements.

This is a very early attempt at some ideas I have for a richer Silverlight Twitter app – I will blog about it more later, but for now, you can have a play below or by opening this link:

Cheers

Ian