The REMIX 08 event that took place in Paris on April 17th is the smaller and free edition of the MIX conference of Las Vegas. I attented the session named ”Be creator of differences”. It was the occasion for Microsoft to show how Silverlight and WPF can be used to create rich interactive applications. Microsoft also reaffirmed its will to integrate designers in the development cycle of RIAs, by using the Studio Expression products.

In the introduction, the speaker, Dick Lantim, has redefined the RIA acronym that usually stands for “Rich Internet Application”. For Microsoft, RIA means “Rich Interactive Application”. This concept includes both RDAs (Rich Desktop Applications) and RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). For each of these applications Microsoft has an answer which is WPF for the desktop, and Silverlight for the browser. Using these technologies, the three main platforms of RIAs can be addressed : PC (WPF), Mobile and Web (Silverlight). Note that for the mobiles, Microsoft has announced that Silverlight will be available on Windows Mobile and Symbian.

Some WPF demos were shown, as well as Silverlight 2 demos. For Microsoft, the target is clearly to make Silverlight as visible as possible, and to put it as an alternative to Flash: Several Silverlight demos were based on existing applications developed with Flash, to emphasize on the Silverlight strengths.

As the release date of Silverlight 2 approaches (August 08), the differences between WPF and Silverlight in terms of features are becoming subtle. The big differences are:

• WPF can access the computer resources (files, …).
• WPF supports 3D.
• WPF can only be used on a PC where the .NET Framework is installed.

 Interesting points that were covered:

• Deep Zoom : A built-in load on demand technology for huge images on Silverlight. Huge images are tiled using the Deep Zoom Composer tool. Then, the MultiScaleImage object is used to display the tiles.
• Pages Indexation : Web sites containing dynamic pages (ASP.NET, AJAX, …) or Silverlight controls are difficult to index by search engines. Several solutions can be used to solve this problem, such as mirroring the dynamic web site by a static web site containing only HTML. Another solution is to detect that a crawler is indexing the site, and to dynamically create the pages for the crawler.

 Robert Dupuy

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