Silverlight is slowly becoming the real WPF/Everywhere

Maybe some of you know, that originally Silverlight was called WPF/E, or WPF Everywhere. This meant that it would be a cross-platform, cross-device little brother of WPF. You could see a few videos years ago on Channel9, showing off some working Silverlight Mobile applications (they were pretty slow though). But no questions regarding when this would be available was answered – until now.

During the Silverlight Firestarter event, we could hear Brad Abrams say that Microsoft’s goal was to get Silverlight on all three screens, and the cloud. The cloud is of course Azure (but would work with other environments, too), and the client side environment would be Silverlight. The three screens are the desktop, the mobile phone and the television. Since then, quite a few articles have appeared, and MS officials have officially stated that “We are 100% dedicated to seeing Silverlight" across all three screens”. (Microsoft will push Silverlight 3.0 across all three screens).

Why is this interesting? You can use the same .net programming language, the same rich design tools and graphics capabilities to create great looking, usable and “rich” applications – be it a mobile phone, a TV, the web or the desktop. The goal is to make all these runtimes binary compatible. The applications can be fed with data from the same cloud, or store their data on the cloud. You can start viewing a movie at home on the TV, and finish it on the bus on your phone (or in a worse case, in the office…) We can use .Net RIA Services or WCF… Finally (hopefully) it won’t be a pain in the backside to develop cool and of course useful applications for mobile. Of course, from a UX point of view, a TV and a touchscreen UI needs totally different design.

Another related news is that Microsoft is going to work with Intel, independently of the Mono effort to create a Silverlight runtime for the Moblin platform. Silverlight for Moblin is going to be highly optimized for the Atom processor. (Moblin is a Linux based OS and app. stack for Mobile Internet Devices, netbooks, nettops, car computers, etc.).

Finally about the when: it seems like the next step may be Silverlight Mobile (for Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile 7). Unfortunately, it is unknown whether Silverlight will be working on WM6 – but the leaked baseline hardware requirements for WinMo7 seem to be strong enough to make Silverlight run decently. Maybe we will know more during the PDC in autumn!

The new Silverlight mantra is: cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-device. It seems we are looking forward a great time to develop rich applications for all devices!