April fool’s day and Silverlight

Some nice jokes on this year’s april fool’s day… Loved the ones from Google and their GMail, but the one that I’m most impressed with is the Youtube flip. They probly had to change fonts, rotate images and bunch of other stuff. If Youtube was done in Silverlight 3, this whole effect would took exactly 10 min to implement. You would just write a flip shader effect, make an effect out of that and just attach it to any control you wish to flip. Easy as pie.

As I was talking to my friend yesterday (ASP enthuziast) and I’ve realized that everything you can do in Silverlight 2, you can do in ASP and AJAX. So why do Silverlight 2 then? First of all I’m terrified of HTML and CSS. Those things are a mess. And when I saw that the Visual Studio ASP designer “isn’t that great”, and relies on “accepting a CSS file” as the way of designing stuff I immediately droped the whole thing.  ASP and AJAX are build upon this big pile of HTML and Javascript. And dear god is HTML old; hasn’t been changed from probly 1991, and Javascript is a whole other story. HTML is something like Adobe Flash. People hack it to make it do something that wasn’t meant to do. And with time that became normal, and now everyone hacks away disscussing about “the right way” to do something. You all are doing it the wrong way, and by doing that halting the evolution of Web. That’s why I never did web until Silverlight, ‘cuz it was a big pile of rubbish you have to dig thru to get to even more rubbish at the bottom.

Silverlight brough in XAML. Now that’s modern HTML if there is one, but that’s not why I use Silverlight. The real reason is Blend. I’m not a designer, but Blend let’s me do really cool looking, neatly organized user interfaces in a matter of minutes. Not that I’m promoting Blend or Microsoft or anyone, but the workflow with Visual Studio, Silverlight and Blend is just amazing. Blend is like the Visual Studio designer on drugs. Apart from that, Silverlight 2 doesn’t bring any new wow usable features to the web scene.  But Silverlight 1 and 2, and even Blend 2 are all just sort of previews for Silverlight 3 and Blend 3.

Google Silverlight 3 and Blend 3 features, or watch MIX’09 videos about it. That’s amazing. GPU acceleration, pixel shaders, sketch flow. That makes a difference. So get aquainted with Silverlight, ‘cuz it’s gonna get a lot more cooler than this.

What’s New in Microsoft Silverlight 3