All the buzz here at
Microsoft MIX in Vegas is rightly about Silverlight, but one other impressive demo I came
across was a Vista gadget (a.k.a. widget) for Disney. Entertainment and Devices Division
President Robbie Bach was on the main stage yesterday, talking about marketing
Microsoft's connected entertainment services. One of the case studies wheeled out was
Disney, which -
as The Seattle Times reports - is working with Microsoft and large OEMs selling
computers in China to install a software gadget on new PC desktops. The gadget features
content meant to attract people to the company's Hong Kong theme park. Bach pointed out
that Vista's gadgets (mini web apps that run on your desktop) are a way for brands such
as Disney to establish a presence on "some of the most valuable real estate in the home"
- i.e. the PC desktop. The Seattle Times goes on:
As noted in our coverage of Ray Ozzie's MIX keynote this morning, Microsoft has released a number of significant upgrades to its Silverlight product. Silverlight is essentially a competitor to Adobe's Flash, in that enables developers to create interactive web apps. It's officially described as "a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web." Ryan Stewart's definition puts it in context of Microsoft's other dev platforms:
"You can build desktop applications with Windows Presentation Foundation, build web-only applications with ASP.NET AJAX and now the hybrid Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight."
The enhancements announced today for Silverlight include integration with .NET and support for dynamic languages - including Python and Ruby. Microsoft also announced new tool support for building Silverlight applications, with Expression Studio and the next edition of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas".
Tell us what you think of the new-look Silverlight in this week's poll, below.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to a blogger lunch with Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and General Manager of Client and Web Platform & Tools Scott Guthrie. The discussion was mostly developer focused, but right at the end I managed to get a question in about Microsoft's strategy for IE and live.com. I asked Ray what is Microsoft's vision for Live.com and more generally, their IE browser, given that Firefox, Maxthon and other browsers are on the road to becoming "information brokers" - which is the term used by Mozilla to describe the upcoming Firefox 3. The background to this question is that widgets, web services and RSS feeds are now key components of the Web ecosystem, so the browser has a lot of potential to broker all of these services (note: unfortunately I didn't ask the question as elegantly as I just wrote it!).
Ray's answer was that Microsoft is creating a platform for developers to build componentized things like widgets and other web services, but he wasn't able to elaborate on IE's future role in this growing ecosystem - because IE's development plans in that respect are still under wraps. He acknowledged that Firefox is becoming an information broker, saying that this is part of a continued trend in browsers where they are becoming more interactive and writeable. He noted that initially browsers were read-only, but browsers nowadays are able to be written to as well. He also discussed the general trend of componentization, which is basically what is happening with widgets and web services. He said that IE4 was a componentized browser, so this has been a trend for a while in browsers.
I'm
at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, courtesy of Microsoft New Zealand. Ray Ozzie
has just completed his keynote speech, in which he delivered a more refined
version of his 'integrated Web/Desktop' vision. He talked about how the best
solutions are "integrated solutions", meaning integrated Web, desktop
and mobile. He talked about RIAs and devices, and noted that in this era SAAS now
means "software *and* a service". He went on to say that web apps
today and tomorrow are complicated, fragmented. He also noted the richness of
all the possible delivery platforms in this era.
Next Ray Ozzie outlined two types of web apps - what he calls "Universal Web" apps, meaning ajax, html, browser based apps. Then he discussed "Experience First" apps - xbox, mobile, pc desktop apps. He pointed out that "the most sucessful solutions have an element each of universal web and experience first".
Ray said that a common design pattern has emerged for this new era of desktop/web/mobile apps - desktop for richness, browser for tagging and other collaboration/community features, mobile for location-specific information.
Ray said that this "brings together the best of the web, best of the desktop and best of the device - using the service as a hub". He also noted that to build these apps, developers and designers can use all kinds of platforms - some of them not Microsoft's. He may've been referring to Adobe Apollo, for example. (Incidentally, I visited Adobe's HQ last week and there is a post on that coming soon).
Next up, Ray Ozzie announced some major upgrades to the Silverlight product, which was first announced a couple of weeks ago. There are 3 main parts to Silverlight now, said Ozzie.
