This post is long overdue. In March, Infusion showcased a Silverlight Beta 2 demo called Woodgrove Financial at the
Financial Developers conference in New York City. In addition to being a great demo to show off the capabilities of Silverlight, the complete source code was posted for the developer community. You can also run the online version right now
over here.
The demo was created in conjunction with the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) team of Microsoft US. The demo isn't meant to be a product or a real site -- its meant to showcase the capabilities of Silverlight in various aspects of retail banking, and provide walkthroughs of scenarios that will speak to Retail bankers business and technology folks.
Since then, there have been a number of blog posts referencing the demo -- I wanted to use this post to consoldate the useful ones in a single post here for ease:
Silverlight is definately a cool technology -- one that most certainly will help the Web transform from the current DHTML experience into something much more polished and slick. Although AJAX has vastly improved the interactations on web pages to provide a richer experience from a quick click-response perspective, it is fundamentally limited by the same asthetics that traditional DHTML provides.
Flash has for years provided a richer visual experience to DHTML, but at the expense of navigation, richness of content (generally flash is used for rather simplistic sites), but Microsoft is serious about playing catchup.
From a developer's perspective, I'm especially excited by the overlap between WPF on the desktop and Silverlight on the web, versus say traditional WinForms development and traditional ASP.NET development.
Look for some future posts from me showcasing the Insurance flavour of this demonstrator (to us a UK term), Messenger/Live integration, and new Silverlight features that we incorporate as the framework develops.
If anyone has any issues running the code or getting the demo to work locally, give me a shout and we can work them out.
Syd.