- Where Does Silverlight Come From?
- Using Third-Party Plug-Ins
- Running on Multiple Platforms
- Making the Web Application Secure
- Introducing Silverlight.net
- What Do You Need to Run Silverlight?
- Updating Your Runtime-Automatically
- Trying Silverlight Demos
- What Do You Need to Develop Silverlight?
- Reading the Documentation
- Looking into Silverlight's Future
- Summary
Looking into Silverlight’s Future
Web technologies are evolving fast, and any attempt to look into the future and predict where they are heading in the long term will result in mortifying failure for the psychic...Silverlight is no exception. It’s almost impossible to predict where the technology will be five or ten years from now.
One thing is sure, though: Microsoft is putting a lot of effort in Silverlight and porting the .NET framework to multiple platforms. Mobile Silverlight will “hit us” in the very close future. And because so many developers are already active on the .NET platform, we will see more and more Silverlight content soon.
It is also safe to write that Silverlight and WPF will become always more compatible with each other. Silverlight 2 is already delivering a great number of WPF-compatible classes. Learning either WPF or Silverlight will offer an easy passage to the other.
Is ASP.NET/HTML/JavaScript Dead?
With the advent of Rich Interactive Applications (RIAs) made with Silverlight or Flash, one can wonder if classic ASP.NET will still be available in the future. One thing is sure: ASP.NET is a very strong and important pillar of Microsoft’s client application strategy. In fact, Microsoft also released updates to the ASP.NET framework with its .NET framework 3.5 this year.
With “classic” ASP.NET (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) for “thin clients,” Silverlight for RIAs and WPF for desktop applications, you cover the whole range of client applications. And since all these platforms run .NET, you can use the same programming language of your choice (amongst C#, VB.NET and many others) to create your libraries.
So in short: No, ASP.NET is definitely not dead, and HTML-based web pages will continue to entertain and inform us on the Internet for many years to come.