Silverlight- .NET and JavaScript interop?
posted in Technology, Developers |The Silverlight announcements at MIX this week are pretty exciting. I’d been doing a bunch of work in WPF/E (the old name for Silverlight) and the new release seems like some solid progress.
One of the most interesting parts of the announcement is the support for a mini-CLR that runs .NET code anywhere Silverlight runs. It appears to have a very limited set of the framework libraries. Given that the install is only 4MB this isn’t a surprise. But my big question is how will interop work between the .NET and Javascript work.
One of the bigger problems we had with Avalon (WPF) meeting the needs of web developers is that we changed the app model all around. You weren’t serving dynamic script from the server, the app had to be compiled and use web-services or something to talk back to the server. WPF/E was interesting because you could use some of the same graphic capabilities while sticking with a conventional Javascript coding model.
If Silverlight supports good Javascript / .NET interop you could have the best of both worlds. Build controls, etc, in .NET where the cleaner programming model and better performance helps. And script the logic and flow of your app in Javascript using conventional web tools. I haven’t had a chance to dig into the new release but it looks promising.
I’ve also got my fingers crossed for an announcement of linux support. I can think of about 5 or 6 projects that could use Silverlight if there were support for running on linux.