Spicing up user experience w/ Silverlight – Tech Session, Day 2

This session was probably the biggest disappointment of the conference so far… not that I really have a lot of high hopes for Microsoft’s RIA framework, but this was just ridiculous.  The speaker was not an employee of MS, so I’ll cut her some slack… but if her attitude towards the framework is any indication of the real motives behind Microsoft creating Silverlight then they simply don’t get it.  Several times the speaker repeated the line “isn’t this cool!?” to the room full of dead quiet developers.  Some guy spoke up, “Doesn’t Flash already do this?”.  Yea, it’s basically exactly like Flash, except maybe more like Flash 4.  She was all excited about the drag-and-drop controls, most of which do already exist in flash (graphing, sliders, etc).  A lot of people, including myself, jumped out of there a few minutes early…

Day 2 Keynote: “Good Morning… btw, the WWW sucks.”

Ok, he didn’t really say that in so many words but that was pretty much what was thrown at us during the opening keynote at 7:30am this morning. The main message: The WWW has problems. Serious problems. It’s not secure, and it just wasn’t built for the kinds of Web 2.0 applications that are becoming increasingly popular. But, on the other hand… it works, and for a lot of people that’s ok. However, keynote speaker Douglas Crockford from Yahoo seems to believe that the end of the world wide web may be at hand and other technologies such as AIR, Silverlight, or JavaFX may be there ready to compete for dominance if new standards that fix these issues aren’t put in place within the next decade. Ultimately he said that the DOM and Javascript need to be replaced all together… which is definitely no small task.

Also of note, he mentioned jsLint, a javascript verifier, as well as Google’s Caja and Cajita to help safely allow javascript-enabled third-party widgets in mashups, but this isn’t a viable solution for securing RIAs.