RIA Weekly #005 – Silverlight

This week, Ryan and I have “Silverlight/WPF Rock-star” Robby Ingebretsen, Director of Interactive Development, at IdentityMine. We talk a whole bunch of Silverlight, thankfully making up for the lack in thereof in previous episodes.

Download the episode directly, or get it auto-magically from the feed.

As a small admin note, I’ve added a separate RSS feed for RIA Weekly, per request. You can keep subscribing to the general RedMonk Radio feed (getting all the RedMonk podcasts, including RIA Weekly), or subscribe to the new one. And you cana always download the episodes directly as well.

Using Silverlight: Entertainment Tonight

We start out by talking about IdentityMine’s work with Entertainment Tonight on their Emmy site. Following up on our WMV conversation last week, I ask Robby what he thinks the deal is with WMV. In addition to the DRM options, he says the codec for it is fast and the encoders and server for it are free.

That settled, we get back to the ET site. I ask Robby how and why they used Silverlight, and he tells me about the “virtual producer” they built: allowing people to build up video clips into one stream. I use this as a chance to gripe about a recent Flash movie experience I had at watching AfterWorld.tv episodes. There’s lots of short videos there, and if you watch a 20-30 of them at once, you have to watch the credits each time. Better to be able to splice them together, which sounds like what this “virtual producer” does.

WPF/.Net and Silverlight Convergence?

Ryan then kicks off a conversation about Silverlight and WPF converging together. In this topic, I ask Robby about the separation of Silverlight from .Net proper, sort of driving at the question of why they’re (mentally at least) separate technologies. As Robby outlines, the “separation” is nuanced since there’s plenty of .Net libraries in Silverlight and seem to be more such stuff planned.

Wrapping up this convergence, we talk about the funny point that Adobe and Microsoft are approaching this convergence from two different angles: Adobe is starting out with a base of designers, reaching for developers, while Microsoft is starting out with a base of developers and, reaching for designers.

WPF vs. Silverlight and Consumer Uses

Next up, Ryan asks Robby if he likes WPF or Silverlight better. While WPF is more powerful and has access to more, Robby says Silverlight is more mainstream and fun. That said, WPF is fun on it’s own due to how much you can do with it, but Silverlight gets more spread on the web and, thus, in the consumer space at the moment.

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I’ll finish out the show notes in a bit – busy day tomorrow. I wanted to go ahead and post the episode tonight, so here it is ;>

Disclaimer: Microsoft and Adobe are clients. Check our clients list for folks we talk about that I might have missed in my haste to post.

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