Developing Silverlight 1.0 RIAs
This will be the archive for my advancements in Silverlight 1.0 development, now made pretty much obsolete by the 2.0 Beta 2 plugin released last week.
I’ve worked on four SL 1.0 projects:
- myHSN, which I can no longer find online — September, 2007.
- Reading Pre-Columbian Artifacts and Waldseemüller Maps for the Library of Congress, developed concurrently — November-December, 2007.
- WWE’s Silveright Video Player, up but with features pulled — December, 2007-January, 2008.
- Creating the US Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights for the LOC — April, 2008.
All of these projects were developed under extremely tight deadlines and generally had ad-hoc development processes. HSN was a mess because the plugin was released after development had started. The first LOC projects had a lot of UX, creative, and project management complications. WWE actually followed our architecture and development processes very well but it was an overly ambitious project for a technology this immature.
For the last LOC project, I was finally able to piece together techniques developed over the last six months. It was still a very tight deadline and inevitably a bit ad-hoc, but I am still proud of it.
Challenges in Silverlight 1.0 Development
Silverlight 1.0 development is difficult by its reliance on two technologies:
- XAML
- JavaScript
Of course, that’s all there is to Silverlight 1.0! On top of that, it’s a buggy plugin, but there’s not much we can do about that. Instead, I’ll focus on ways to address the challenges presented by SL 1.0’s core technologies.
- Part 1: Xaml
- Part 2: JavaScript Optimization
- Part 3: JavaScript Architecture