Silverlight is a cross browser, cross platform plug-in that delivers a consistent user experience across browsers, and can reproduce deployed client performance in the browser.  If you look a little deeper it could be considered a little more than a plug-in.  In fact it could be considered a development platform.  It should not be thought of to replace existing browser targeted technologies, but to augment their capabilities.  In fact browsers were designed with browsing in mind, so it could be argued that the new capabilities in Silverlight are more appropriate for developing and delivering a richer experience within the browser.

What's interesting to our team is what business value Silverlight brings.  What new scenarios can be developed, or existing ones extended or improved.  So here are some thoughts:

Next Generation Media Experiences

A seamless video capture, distribution and playback experience can be delivered due to the range of supported codec's in the Silverlight player.  Supported codec's include WMA, WMV and MP3.  Meaning a personal video camera can be used to record some footage, upload to a PC using Windows Media Player, and made available to the web.  This can eliminate the requirement for expensive and time consuming pre-production processing, which ultimately can reduce the cost of getting video clips onto the web.  This also reduces the time between the initial creation of the idea to its consumption.

It's very simple to overlay artefacts on top of video.  So if a movie trailer is being played in the browser, links to further products or additional information about the movie can be placed on the video.  Delivering a compelling click through experience to the user.  This leads to the potential for up-sell and cross-sell of products, in addition to increasing stickiness of the site because it adds more value.

Video can have associated meta data.  Meaning that it is easy to tag different points within a video with additional information.  This information can be used to enable richer use of the video content, for example easy searching within the content.  This obviously reduces the cost of pre-production processing, and increases the value and usefulness to customers.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

Features such as drag and drop, rotate and zoom, enable a more pleasurable and intuitive user experience.  You can see some video examples here, and play with some samples here.  Previously this level of interaction was expensive to develop and maintain.  This enhanced level of interaction can make a website more fun to use, which can in turn increase traffic.

Team Structure

Because the Silverlight runtime can consume XAML in the same way that WPF can, it means that a design and development team can be structured in a more appropriate way.  The designers can use a design tool, such as one of the Expression products, and deliver the design in XAML to the developers.  The developers can then take this XAML, import it into their development tool and add the code that implements the business functionality.  This type of team structure can improve efficiency, resulting in a product being delivered faster to market, as well as improving the overall quality of the final product.

This way of working has many benefits including the designers original design actually gets implemented in tact, and the design is abstracted from the business logic.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Because the content authored in Silverlight is purely textual it lends itself to be indexed and therefore, theoretically more discoverable.  I say only theoretically because currently search engines do not search for, and index XAML files.  However there are some interesting approaches to solving this.  Taking this approach results in a web property being listed by a search engine, which in turn drives awareness and traffic to the site.

I hope the above ideas and examples have given some food for thought as to Silverlight's applicability to web based scenarios.

Simon Thurman

Remember Windows 3.11? Office 3.0? Still got any floppies or DAT tapes gathering dust on your bookshelf?

Over the last few months I've been in a bit of a time warp... one minute Silverlight... then the next in DOS 6 and considering the implications of getting access to digitally born documents and applications from 10+ years ago. How do documents get stored and migrated to ensure they can be read in the future? How do you make sure those documents can be viewed exactly as they were intended/created? What about the lifecycle of that document? - the changes history?, annotations?, embedded fonts?, ... quite a minefield!

Thankfully the guys I've been working with at The National Archives live and breath this stuff! They have the responsibility to conserve the nation's paper-based and digital heritage and to make it accessible to those who want to view it. Phew!

Anyone remember the Domesday Project 1986 laser discs that Blue Peter buried in their garden? All was well... using the latest and greatest technology presuming it had a strong future... and the nightmare of trying to find a laserdisc reader for a BBC Micro just a few years later. That sums up the problem for me!

The announcement we just made with the National Archives is trying to address the issue of digital conservation head-on. With billions of documents in the world wrapped up in proprietary document formats (from Microsoft and many many other vendors) we felt it was important to focus on how we can help the body in the UK which has the biggest headache and do what we can to assist them in:

• Migrating documents to the latest Office format (Open XML) via our document conversion tools to ensure they can be accessed by the public in the future
• Ensuring legacy documents can be viewed as accurately as possible when compared to their original
• Determining the best way to migrate certain documents
• Understanding what version of tools a document was created in so a conversion process can be automated

To support these aims we evaluated the key Office and Windows combinations that have shipped and looked at some of the typical types of documents in the archive. We built a set of Virtual PC 2007 virtual hard drives containing those O/S and Office versions and made them available to the folks at the Archives to use in their on-going document conversion process.

[Gordon Frazer demonstrating the VPC library]

At the press launch, I demonstrated the new National Archives Virtual PC 2007 library of previous Microsoft operating systems and Office suites going back to Office 3.0 on Windows 3.11. Remember that beautiful white background? the chunky icons? the "easter egg" with the cast role of the developers (by clicking the yellow flag in help about with ctrl + shift a few times)? It all came flooding back and really made everyone realise how far things have moved in less that two decades! 

The Virtual PC 2007 environment is going to provide an effective way for documents to be viewed in the original context in full fidelity and to enable step-by-step version upgrades to be performed if some document fidelity is lost in other conversion approaches.

Open XML is an Ecma International standard and, once documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. are converted to the various Office XML formats we should be in an easier place to keep migrating documents forward. With XML being based on text we stand a good chance!

So why are we doing this now? Well, we've actually been working with The British Library and The National Archive for about 18 months now on digital preservation with some other European organisations as members of an EU project called Planets. 

I think its fair to say that we are still near the start of getting the digital preservation problems sorted, but I'm pleased to say we're actively engaged in listening to the issues and taking some real action to make the digitally-born legacy of documents readable for our kids, our kids kids, ...

Richard Godfrey and Geoff Hughes

Take a look at the following articles for more background on the announcement:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm which also has a video interview with the Microsoft UK MD Gordon Frazer - my laptop's 15 minutes of fame! :-)

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2117863,00.html

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39287842,00.htm

http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/applications/desktop/news/index.cfm?newsid=3843

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/microsoft+saves+digital+archives/587172