Component makers see 2009 as a big year for MS platforms
January 15, 2009 —
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The gears are turning for implementations of Microsoft's next generation of platform technologies, and as a matter of course, component makers are the leading-edge innovators. In 2009, some of the latest Microsoft technologies will be gaining the most traction as Silverlight's star rises and developers rethink how they structure Web applications.
Silverlight is rapidly becoming a popular platform for component developers to target. ComponentArt, ComponentOne, Developer Express and Infragistics are all making controls for creating business applications and filling in functionality that Microsoft has omitted.
Miljan Braticevic, president of ComponentArt, captured that sentiment in just a few words: "Silverlight is huge." The component model that Microsoft shipped with Silverlight is impressive and friendly toward building components, he said.
Silverlight 2 is based on a subset of the .NET Common Language Runtime and shares most of its capabilities. Executives interviewed by SD Times were unanimous in saying that Silverlight 2 would be the version of the platform that they target over the coming year.
"We will put all of our resources on Silverlight," said Gustavo Eydelsteyn, managing director at ComponentOne. He noted that the company would be developing Silverlight 2 controls for building business applications. He said that Silverlight 3, which promises innovations around digital media, would likely not affect ComponentOne directly.
Indeed, component makers are settling into the platform. "We are not particularly worried about Silverlight 3; the differences from Silverlight 1.0 to 2 were far greater [than future changes will be]," explained Julian Bucknall, CTO of DevExpress.
While many Silverlight controls introduced thus far have been relatively simple, ComponentArt sees the opportunity to build enterprise-level controls that deliver new functionality to end users, Braticevic explained. "Great controls will increase the value of the platform," he said.
"Interoperability between AJAX and Silverlight is particularly interesting to us," he said. ComponentArt will work to blur the lines between the frameworks by delivering components that permit developers to implement business logic in a way that is "client platform agnostic," he said.
"A large number of development managers are in a dilemma about which technology [ASP.NET AJAX versus Silverlight] to use for their next project. We will tie them together to make our entire offering appealing to customers," Braticevic said.
Related Search Term(s): .NET, SharePoint, Silverlight, Windows, ComponentArt, ComponentOne, Developer Express, Infragistics, Microsoft
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