We're now at the end of day 3 of the TechEd Expo and another
interesting day. For the first time we felt the effects of
having the Expo area open at the same time as the sessions:
the traffic today was slower and we were able to really get
into some deeper conversations without fear of interruption.
Two conversations stood out in particular today. The first
riffed some more on the install issue that I'd talked about in
an earlier blog post from Tuesday.
The second was about Silverlight. A particular customer who
uses and likes our Windows Forms and ASP.NET products was
wondering why we weren't doing more for Silverlight. He'd
recently -- essentially as soon as Silverlight 2 beta 1 came
out -- decided to abandon the ASP.NET version of his product,
already fairly well advanced, and delve into Silverlight for
his rich internet application. He was fairly derisory about
vendors selling simple WPF controls, dressed up, "I can do
that myself with the standard controls in Silverlight with
XAML", but was really hurting by the lack of the more complex
controls.
In essence: "we've made the switch completely to Silverlight,
why don't you?"
As I explained, there was just no way we could countenance
that. Our development teams are not split up by platform
necessarily, but generally along product lines. To take an
example, our scheduling products are all produced by the
scheduling team. Creating a Silverlight version of
XtraScheduler would be within their purview, and doing so
immediately at the exclusion of everything else would mean
that our current scheduler customers would suffer through lack
of attention.
That really goes for the entire product suite really:
switching over to a single platform immediately means that all
our customers suffer, except possibly for the few that need
Silverlight controls as soon as possible.
No, we'd rather approach the problem carefully and develop WPF
and Silverlight controls in a measured fashion, making sure
that we respond and cater for our existing customers with new
functionality and features, while all along developing these
XAML-capable controls in tandem. And we are doing so, although
I can't talk about what we're doing yet apart from the
controls we've already announced and already shown off in
demos, etc.
I can't say that this particular customer was pleased with the
answer, but it is the only answer I could give.
Indeed, there were a couple of other customers who came up
today and asked about various controls for either WPF or
Silverlight (One was asking for a property grid for
Silverlight, essentially meaning our vertical grid would have
to be converted.) I gave the same answer: we can't do
everything at once, but we are working on more controls than
we've announced so far, and, no, I can't give out any release
dates.
I agree that Silverlight is impressive technology and I
certainly believe that it will be big once released. But it is
still in beta, Microsoft are still actively developing the
framework for it, we don't want to particularly replicate
controls that they must be developing internally, and so we're
developing for it in not such an overtly aggressive manner.
But, make no mistake, we are developing for it.