Well, I just started a new position as a C# Engineer at a great new .com. The people seem great here. And the cool thing is I will be not only doing what I love (more standard ASP.NET and Web design for a public website), I’m also going to be venturing into some WPF and Silverlight as well which is pretty exciting stuff. The application due to company disclosures I cannot say but Silverlight is perfect for the application I’ll be working on in a few months. I am a strong advocate for Silverlight. It is not just another Flash competitor. First off, you don’t have to do Flash Script (Thank God). Second, Silverlight is being extended so rapidly and so richly by Microsoft that WPF and Silverlght are going to change how windows applications and even interaction on the web in the future to heights we have never seen.
I love it when people say Silverlight is just a pretty windows forms. Nah, that’s a naive view especially when most who say that know nothing about Silveright except that what they see on Microsoft's Silverlight website which to me is pretty darn impressive even next to flash. But It’s much more. First off WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is a pretty exciting new platform for coding windows forms. You couple that power with Silverlight and you can’t beat it for certain applications where it makes sense to use it.
With that, I leave with the hopes to be posting more on ASP.NET 3.5, Silverlight, WPF and whatever else I dive into here. While I’m still a web guy, I don’t mind playing with Silverlight and WPF. I feel the opportunity to program in both really makes me lucky and I look forward to blogging about it here soon.
We’ll also be recoding the .com site from .NET 2.0 to 3.5 sometime next year so that will definitely be exciting. I’ve had the chance to code in ASP.NET MVC. Whether we’ll go that route is to be determined…I don’t care either way really, but MVC is pretty clean I have to say. We’ll see what the boss wants. Basically I like coding in ASP.NET 3.5 period so I’m not extremely picky but I do like the MVC design pattern. At the time (preview 2) that I was working in it on another team, it was a bit premature for my taste and we spent way too much time coding in something that Microsoft kept changing every month..that got a bit tiresome.
I urge you to play around with Silverlight and WPF and really see what it has to offer before making any assumptions that it’s just “another flash”.
I was just handed a couple new Silverlight books below at work today. I’ll review them once I get done reading them.
