Cloud Services are Important to Silverlight’s Future

If there is one thing that has been solidified in my mind based on my experiences over the past few months of writing my book, it is that cloud services are important to RIA’s future. Very important. Of the questions about Silverlight and RIA that I receive, the vast majority of them revolve around web services, SOAP, JSON, XML, REST, cross domain policies, security of services, syndication, Astoria, passing entities over the web, and duplexity. There are questions on bindings, animations, control suites, and other, but the tone in the questions gets deep when the cloud is discussed. I guess I could just be noticing this because I am writing a book that focuses on this topic, and maybe that’s true. But when I first started writing the book, I was not sure if anyone cared about this topic. I just wanted to write it because I was interested in the topic and wanted to share.

So as we cruise to the release of Silverlight 2, I’m looking beyond this release a what might be in the next release. I think we’ll see a lot of graphical improvements, but where I see a great opportunity for growth is in the area of building more expansive cloud services support with Silverlight. Security, improved REST service interoperability, PUT, DELETE, increasing the HTTP stack, and other features that make working with cloud services would greatly enhance development in Silverlight and give it a big edge over competition. Who knows what’ we’ll see, but from everything I hear from readers, there is a lot of interest in this area.