Silver Friday

Instead of Black Friday and shopping I had Silver Friday and spent part of the day looking at Silverlight 4 Betaannounced at PDC09.  Its always fun to look at new technology and this was the first time I have looked at any version of Silverlight.

I mostly focused on Silverlight’s potential to support cross-platform (MacOS and Windows) desktop applications because I may be able to use it in a future project.  Users can try a demo app online, install it locally and get more features when running out of the browser.  The app can also silently update itself with the latest version from the parent website keeping all clients on the same version.

Enabling out of browser support requires no code, just a couple build settings in project properties.  The user installs the app by following a right click menu of the app when running in a browser.  The out of browser app can be configured to run in trusted mode giving it access to parts of the local file system and a few other things.  The trusted app still runs in the Silverlight sandbox but the sandbox is a just little bigger.

I found one limitation that is a deal breaker for my upcoming project however.  The Silverlight 4 clipboard only supports text.  No images, no vector graphics, just text.  Regardless of these limitations Silverlight still has great potential to deliver cross platform desktop applications.