[intended public is not the silverlight guru’s, but rather my friends and others that do not understand the coming of a new web :) ]

As I am preparing for our adventure in Canada, I’m meeting up with loads of old friends to have ‘one last beer’. That always seems to take place in my local Irish Pub, where I have spent way too many nights drinking their lovely Irish Red beer. I prefer it to Guinness, although it was quite nice to visit the Guinness factory in Dublin…

But I digress.

The discussion of the evening always, at some point in time, touches on Silverlight and how I think the web will change because of it. It’s quite a good feeling for me to see that I get all jazzed up talking about it :)
The current reigning web technology is obviously html. It has been king ever since the first webbrowser was introduced and for good reason. It is multi-platform, fast, easy to deploy and well-understood. Most importantly, it is stateless.

However, it can not compete against a desktop application when judged on UI richness and interactivity. Now, I am not talking about a simple mail-client or an rss-reader, but I’m talking about a big client application where quite a bit of information is processed. Is a stateless architecture appropriate for such an application?
No, it is not.

To be more exact: a large part of the application would be best to run on the client, where it can cache data and do processing. That application could (should) still talk to a back-end in a stateless manner.

The html-world has been working hard to ‘fake’ interactivity and has done so remarkably well. However, they will always be fighting against a technology which just wasn’t created to support the scenario’s they are trying to accomplish.

With the introduction of AIR, Flex and Silverlight 2, the kind of scenario’s I am envisioning are becoming a real possibility. It is now possible to create an application that is as rich as a desktop application, without all the hassle of deployment.
But, and this is what amazes me most, many of my friends don’t ‘get’ it. Ouch!! They fail to see how a RIA could do much better than a html based application. It is curious to me how we now all have a powerful desktop computer, and are still using it as a terminal. And even liking it!!

There are things html is perfect for: bringing text and even images in a nice layout. But that’s about it. Asp.Net, Ruby, Php and the lot, are all trying to add programmability to html. Since that is not what html is designed for, they have to process on the server. This model is slow and wasteful.

The only way it seems to really show people how a different web could look like, take a look at the work of thirteen23. Here they show a few different designs of how facebook could look like. It only shows off some nice visuals, so take a look at the incredible photosynth application.
My all time favorite in showing people what the world could look like is still the microsoft health patient journey demonstrator. If that doesn’t make it ‘click’ for you, check out another demo of woodgrove financial or a different way of browsing amazon.

The next few months or years, html will still be king. But it is inevitable that the web will transition towards the richness the new technologies are able to offer. I’m looking forward to seeing that happen and I hope that the current batch of html/ruby/asp.net/jscript/whatever developers are not missing out on the incredible opportunities it presents.

I started my career when I was still in university. I started a company named Sitechno that did webapplications and custom solutions. The last few years, I’ve been hired as a consultant on some big projects.
The role I was given on my last project, allowed me to do some crazy cool stuff, using nHibernate and winforms. I was able to push WCF, WF and WPF into a big client/server application, and had great success with it. We reformed a monolithic data-oriented application into a domain-oriented loosely coupled application.

It’s easy enough to find new projects, but the market for the cutting edge technologies is not very big

When I was asked to join Microsoft, my main attraction to the offer was the opportunity to work on cutting edge technology with a group of passionate people. When I talked Microsofties on the Redmond campus, it became clear that they could certainly offer just that.

I was torn between working on EF (which, I’ve been very involved with lately) and on Silverlight.
In the end, Silverlight won, because I strongly believe it to be the strongest contender in the client space, there is an interesting ‘war’ going on right now, and I have really enjoyed working with the WPF-framework in the past. I was torn by the decision because whatever choice I made, I knew that a great opportunity would be lost.

We will be heading to Vancouver, Canada in September and I will work for Microsoft Canada for a year. After that, I will be allowed to work in the U.S.A. and we will move to Redmond.

You can not believe how excited I am about this opportunity. I will be working for Shawn Burke on Silverlight Controls. I’m not sure yet who else is working on the team, but I believe/hope I’ll be working with David, Ted, Kirti and Jeff.

As for EFContrib: although I’m dedicated to it, I’m having a hard time finding the time to work on it. Also, since version 2.0 of EF will feature some nice Poco capabilities. So, I’m not sure if people are waiting for the solution. It would be nice to make it work with SL though! So, if I find the time, or get lots of mail of people wanting me to finish it properly, I’ll work on it some more.

I have been on the same project for a long time, and it has given me many opportunities that I am very thankful for:

• Big time WPF experience. The project was one of the first big WPF projects, starting out when WPF was called Avalon. I have gained a deep insight in the technology and I am very happy to say that I really love it. Yes, it has it's flaws and sometimes feels 'beta-like' still, but it has great potential and is fun to work with.
• WF experience. I was able to do some great stuff with WF and I view WF as a major step forward for business proces modelling. However, it does have it's downfalls , and I am looking forward to the next version to correct those. Having said that, for specific scenario's, WF is really the way to go, even at this moment.
• Architecture: I was able to shape the project using these great technologies and I was given a great team of people to implement it with.

However, it's time for a new challenge now! I'm taking some serious time off to relax and look into new technologies. I'm very interested in the Entity Framework. I haven't blogged about these things for a long time, because I was totally into WPF, but I feel a strong desire to start poking at the framework. I also hope to spend some time looking into F# and all the dynamic language stuff that's been hitting us lately (the DLR). Obviously, I'll take a look at Silverlight, potentially the best thing ever to come out of Redmond. I hope it lives up to expectations!

After my little sabbatical, I will be interested in helping out with new projects. Especially if they are working with .net 3.5. Let me know if you have any projects coming up by emailing me.

First up though, u can expect some newbie posts about the Entity Framework!

Best wishes for the new year.