Later this month (June 25, to be exact), Rod Paddock will be visiting the Winnipeg .NET User Group and talking about Silverlight for Business Developers.

While at DevTeach, I had the opportunity to see an all-day presentation by Rod and Jim Duffy on Silverlight development. Their presentation covered a number of items, including how to style Silverlight applications, data access, etc. Basically, it gave a nice broad introduction to a technology that will be growing in use as it begins to mature. Now that Microsoft has announced that Beta 2 of Silverlight will be released soon, alongside of a "Go Live" license for Silverlight (which basically means that Silverlight applications can now be fully launched for clients and customers, but should still be made known that it is still in "Beta"), I foresee that many applications will grow to use it as time goes on.

That being said, not everyone will switch right away. Why? Well, after becoming immersed back in many technological areas of late, I have become introduced to a movement, if you will, called ALT.NET. One of the elements of this movement (and, by no means, is the only piece of the puzzle) is that one should not limit one's self to a specific technology or methodology - basically, "The right tool for the job". Currently, there are many a site out there (including sites that we do for our clients at work) that utilize large elements of Flash content. If it works and does the job, why change? Depends on what we want. If we want a little animation for marketing purposes, use Flash; almost everyone already has the player installed so why change it? However, if we want a Rich Internet Application (RIA), then we now have options with both Flash and Silverlight.

I can see, still, that Flash will continue to dominate at this time. Why? Lots of investment already by companies with employees already skilled in the technology. It works, it has had years to gain maturity in the industry... why break a good thing? However, it is not the most user friendly for a developer. ActionScript is similar in nature to JavaScript, which many a developer has said sucks (although fellow Canadian Justice Gray is not one of them). The largest complaint, and I have only worked with ActionScript in a very cursory manner, is that there is no true IDE in which to code for it (nothing native to the Adobe suite at any rate). (CAVEAT: Yes, I know that Adobe Flex is now out, but I have not used it and have not discussed it with anyone who has. It may be good, and is geared towards developers, but the inherit items within ActionScript may make using it more complex than it has to be.) There are some coming out, sure, but it's not as intuitive for a developer. And, when one is creating a RIA, understanding software development and how to effectively parse, utilize and manipulate data, is essential. I work with some extremely creative and highly intelligent individuals, but only a few of them grasp the "developer mindset". That being said, what a developer would make look like your standard button these guys can make look like gold to the end user. Different skill sets for different folks. And the rare occasion is that you find individuals who can really bridge that gap between developer and designer.

So, what about Silverlight? It uses 2 tools and multiple technologies. First, for designers, there is Expression Blend (to truly take advantage of Silverlight as it currently stands, you need the 2.5 Preview). This is the designer tool that is used in order to build Silverlight (or WPF) applications. It creates the same solution files that the development tools use, which is completely interchangeable. Speaking of, the developers in a Windows environment use Visual Studio 2008. This allows them to build applications using their favourite .NET compliant language. (Personally, though quite comfortable with VB.NET, I am using some of this time to learn C# more effectively and get back into {} and ;.) The same solution file can be passed back and forth, which is great, because then a developer can add actions and events to items within the Silverlight application in a similar way to how they do it with ASP.NET and WinForms - no new language, no new environment, just a comfortable starting point where you learn a new technology and apply it in a much more seamless manner.

So, after all this, what preparation? Before Rod speaks in Winnipeg, I want to give an Introduction to Silverlight presentation to my coworkers and colleagues. I want to encourage attendance to the event, but also want to get people looking into this system for building RIAs, which seem to be where many an application is going. I think that this is going to be key to have a proper evaluation and review of a competing technology, but also a technology that can be used side-by-side with other pieces. Who says you have to be exclusively Flash or exclusively Silverlight? (Although Adobe and Microsoft, respectively, would probably like that; but keep in mind that Microsoft has not yet migrated to all Silverlight yet either... I had a blog post I read on this that I just have to find...) EDIT: Link added to the previous content for information as to why MS has not fully migrated - it is the obvious.

The key thing here, though, is choice. And to get choice, you have to be informed. This is one way that I hope to contribute and drive people to look at this technology. Whether adopted or not, an informed decision cannot be made without investigation, testing, and most of all having fun in building stuff. That will make or break it for a company.

Over the last few days I have been playing with a few different systems to set up a blog, as well as to find something for the Winnipeg .NET User Group to use as a new system for our website. Since we are a .NET user group, we need a .NET technology solution - so I was looking at a few items.

For my personal site, I looked into 2 solutions - Blog Engine .NET and DasBlog - and here are my experiences with them both, as well as setting them up on GoDaddy.

DasBlog

This was the second one I tried. It seemed pretty good, and I recognized many times as contributors to the system. I got this one working on my local machine in fairly short order. It writes all data to the file system instead of to a database, which works fine locally but on a hosted server... was not sure how that would work. I know I can set folder permissions, but still a little unsure of how to administer that.

So, I set it up locally. All worked well. Then I uploaded the files to my hosting account. Look in the root and... what were all these other files? Turns out that when GoDaddy uninstalled all of the other applications I have installed on my account, they only deleted the database - they did not delete the files. So, sitting there in my file system, were all the physical files from my WordPress installation (they copied over the files from the Linux setup to Windows, even after their tools said it was uninstalled), a previous attempt at Blog Engine .NET, as well as an installation of Community Server.

Blog Engine .NET

This was my 3rd attempt at getting this sucker installed. Each time I used the automatic installation it didn't work. However, I never looked at the file system then, as it was an automatic installation by GoDaddy. When I contacted them about the installation not working, they told me I installed it incorrectly and should reinstall it. I pointed out that it was them who installed it, not me, and I never heard back from them. After trying DasBlog above, I found the files in the file system. I removed all outstanding files and reinstalled... and worked almost perfectly. GoDaddy installs Blog Engine using the SQL interface so I assumed that all items are database driven. Wrong. Turns out that the links to other blogs are file system driven still, so had to add edit capabilities to the folder and now it seems like all functions work.

Coming up next... analysis of various tools I am experimenting with for the UG web site. Any recommendations on free web hosting?