On October 4th 2007, the day Steve Ballmer was in Switzerland and talked about “Next Era of Software” Sascha P. Corti demoed Microsoft’s newest child called Silverlight. Wikipedia describes Silverlight as “competition for Adobe Flash and Sun’s JavaFX”.
Microsoft Silverlight (code-named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E) is a proprietary runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation. The runtime is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux support under development via the third-party Moonlight runtime.
Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of Ajax. It also competes with Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight.
Sascha demoed some applications that use Silverlight and I’ve made some recordings of them. All videos are in German and a little bit shaky. Sorry, I had no tripod and couldn’t place the camera somewhere.
Demo: Pitch It
pitch it is the first user-generated advertising platform in Switzerland. The idea is, that users can generate their own ads for a product and publish it on that site. I haven’t found any more information about the system, but you can find some details on my photo about the pitch it highlights.
Demo: Fake American Airline
This video shows a fake airline in the USA and how they could use Silverlight for their routes. Pretty simple and straight forward.
WPF Demo: British Library
The British Library uses WPF (Wikipedia) to display ancient/old books in which you can browse and turn pages.
Most fun is of course if you go and try it. And let me know if you have other cool demos of Microsoft Silverlight.