Silverlight, DLR and other MIX07 Announcements
While yesterday was a pretty quiet day at the MEDC, next door at MIX07 things were certainly happening. The more interesting announcements included Silverlight 1.0 Beta, Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and the Dynamic Language Runtime but there were also several other announcements including the release of Expression Studio, Project Jasper**, Silverlight Streaming, ASP.NET Futures, Project Astoria and plenty more.
I'll discuss the two I found particularly interesting in a little more detail below:
Silverlight
Silverlight, the old WPFe, was released in beta form and with a Go-Live license. You can download it here (Win) and here (Mac). But the biggest announcement was probably the inclusion of full CLI/CLR support in Silverlight 1.1 for Windows *and* Mac. Basically this means you can write the same managed code and have it run in the browser hosted CLR on either platform. This changes the ball game completely if you're developing web applications as much richer client-side applications can now be written using basically any .NET language including dynamic languages like Ruby, Python and others. [Download 1.1 Mac / Windows]
Silverlight Features:
- It supports full debugging of code running on Mac and Windows from within Visual Studio Orcas
- Similar to the .NET Compact Framework the BCL that ships with Silverlight is just a subset of the full .NET Framework so all the familiar APIs are there.
- AND... it's also got support for the libraries required to enable 3.5 language features like LINQ!
- The whole package, factored desktop JIT/GC and trimmed down class libraries weighs in under 5mb compressed.
- The CLR is not a stripped down or crippled runtime, it's the real thing just streamlined and refactored for this environment.
- Supports all managed languages including support for dynamic languages like Ruby etc with the new Dynamic Language Runtime. (See next point)
See Jason Zander's post for a more detailed list of Silverlight features. It's still Alpha (I loved the little Web 2.0 like Alpha Ribbon on the installer package) so there's still some stability issues but this is without a doubt going to be huge and a have a major impact on the web. And on Adobe's bottom line for that matter.
Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)
The new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a small set of key features to the CLR to make it dramatically better. It adds to the platform a set of services designed explicitly for the needs of dynamic languages. These include a shared dynamic type system, standard hosting model and support to make it easy to generate fast dynamic code. With these additional features it becomes dramatically easier to build high-quality dynamic language implementations on .NET. More importantly, these features enable all of the dynamic languages which use the DLR to freely share code with other dynamic languages as well as with the existing powerful static languages on the platform such as VB.NET and C#.
The DLR is about giving you the best experience for your language - true to the language, excellent tools, performance and seamless integration with a wealth of libraries and platforms. The essential benefits of the DLR are about sharing. It lets language implementers share standard features rather than rebuilding them from scratch. This lets them focus on the features that make a given language unique rather than on reinventing yet another GC system. It lets developers share code regardless of the language the code is implemented in and to use whatever language they prefer regardless of the language preferred by the environment they want to run in.
See Jim Hugunin's
post for the full announcement around the DLR.
There's a ton of other things announced at MIX07 as well and I suggest you check out these links below for more info... If you setup a smart feed or Yahoo! pipe for Silverlight content today pretty sure by the end of the week you'll have enough content to keep you busy until next year :)
To be honest the past couple of months I've been feeling a more and more unimpassioned about Microsoft technology but I get the feeling releases like Silverlight 1.1 and the DLR might just be changing that again :)
** Maybe Microsoft should focus on getting the Entity Framework back on track first before announcing more EF based frameworks.
PS. Recently I've found myself drawn towards Ruby On Rails
when it came to implementing web functionality as it just so much more
productive and geared towads getting things done than working in
ASP.NET. Now I'm unsure of the exact details as neither IronRuby nor
the DLR is available on CodePlex yet but it should be possible to host
the DLR outside of the browser, which should make things like running a
Ruby web server and porting the RoR framework to IronRuby possible.
Running RoR sites in a managed runtime environment would really be
utopia and it might just be the answer to Ruby's Achiles Heel,
performance, something that big RoR sites like Twitter are facing. (See the interesting Alex Payne Interview for more on how they had to cope with massive scaling issues at Twitter)
PPS. And Microsoft also announced Project Codename "Astoria" at MIX which sounds like a library to enable RESTful
services. What makes me a little less than excited about that
announcement is that RESTful services has been with us for years and
nowhere in the announcement do they even link to or mention the term. I
mean there's been a big push for this type of addressing schemes the
past couple of years and there's great support for it in other
platforms but they make it sound like a Microsoft innovation. Stark
contrast to the other announcements where the DLR guys give credit to
Python, Ruby etc etc. Just looking at the urls in the sample docs http://myserver/data.svc/Customers vs what you would have in RoR http://myserver/data/Customers. The RoR url is much nicer :)
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