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Now that my book Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2 is out and I’ve had some time to see what I do and don;t like about Silverlight 2, I’ve started to think about what I’d like to see in Silverlight 3. So here is a short list, not conclusive at all, but a quick list of things I personally would like to see:
- Improve support for building business applications
- Validation support
- Support of credentials from WebClient in Silverlight
- Increase the binding options for WCF to Silverlight (only basicHttpBinding is supported now)
- Improve support for page/control navigation
- Silverlight mobile for Windows Mobile and iPhone (I know, its a pipe dream on the latter)
- More security options
- Designer support in Visual Studio for Silverlight
- Improve designer support in Blend for templates
- Continue to keep the footprint of XAP files low as possible
I have many more wish list items, but I thought this would be a good starting point … chime in with your thoughts. Perhaps in the areas of video and streaming options, 3D enhancements, F#, or something else entirely ???
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- Multicast streaming audio/video, like the original WMPlayer supports, is a must have if SL3 aims to be a major multimedia player inside corporate networks which cannot scale to thousands of unicast simultaneous streams.
- MP4/H.264+AAC decoding support, as in Windows 7 "play all" decoders (http://www.istartedsomething.com/20081115/windows-7-new-decoders-encoders-transcoding/), will be nice too.
- The ability to play Flash 10 SWFs... :)
- The one thing that's missing for me, and its not really a Silverlight feature, but I want native tools in OSX for creating Silverlight content.
I would agree with John, if MS wants Silverlight to be truly cross platform, they should release tooling for OS X.
The REST support in SL 2 isn't complete. I hope UPDATE and DELETE verbs will be supported by SL 3.
I think the tooling is a great suggestion. Eclipse is moving along, but overall it would be nice to have one tool for all platforms. Hey, its my wish list too :-)
What about nailing some of the basics like showing the correct context menu options when you right click over a textfield box instead of the SilverLight Configuration option.
Less Flash-based promotion? A white flag? The towel? It's last dying breath?
More flavors of DRM? Less Flash-based promotion? A white flag? The towel? A last dying breath? Rigor mortis? Code autopsy? iObituary? VH1 "Whatever happened to..." - software edition?
If we can't get 'deletion of the entire project' on the list, can we at least get 'proper MS support for Linux' ? Giving some other people access to your tests is not the same thing.
As to the tooling not being cross platform, leaving aside the obvious reason that MS wants you to buy Windows, I'm surprised the IDE isn't written in something cross platform, if MS are really serious about wanting to run everywhere (which they say they are, but I for one don't believe them).
It would be nice to have module loading for large business applications.
To be able to load the app one module at a time, as needed by the application (not the entire .xap footprint)
This has nothing to do with Silverlight 3, but MSFT should make a cross-platform version of WPF, with the utlimate test being compiling Expression Blend on OSX. (I think I read somewhere Expression Blend is written in WPF, but I could be wrong about that). Cross-platform WPF would really put AIR to shame. No-one has really stepped up at creating a fully functional cross-platform toolkit for modern applications. (I know about wxWindows, QT, Qt's java thing, etc...). And since MSFT really makes some of the best dev tools, I wouldn't mind one bit using a cross-plaform WPF for desktop application development.
However, I actually don't mind the non-cross-platform for the tools side. I'd rather have focus on perfect cross-platform runtime support. Afterall, customers and end-users don't really care what tools are used to get the job done...And if making the tools cross-platform means sacrificing all that is good about Visual Studio to create something like Flex Builder...err, umm...no thanks. While I hate Flex Builder and Eclipse a whole lot less than I used to...the relationship is still rocky.