Silverlight was a disappointment

Yesterday we discussed 3 of what I thought were the most cool topics in the entire course:

• AJAX for ASP.NET
• SilverLight
• Webservices

I already have a profound knowledge of webservices, having build and consumed many in my previous coding experiences, so that topic was not really a challenge.

On to AJAX for ASP.NET. Now that's some cool stuff. Very easy to use, but there in also lies a great danger.

Sure adding AJAX functionality to your ASP.NET is just dragging and dropping 2 controls on your page and voila... your page does AJAX.
A project manager will love to hear that.

But what happens behind the scenes ? .NET adds tons of references to online .js resources to your page (making it slighty more heavy to load, especially for low-bandwith clients) and uses those scripts to support your AJAX needs.

The question I felt compelled to ask myself was: What is something goes wrong ? Suppose one day, your partial page update no longer work and you, the developer, graciously used the .NET controls. What answer will you provide ? Probably something like 'Euuhm, well, mmmm, ...., must be Microsoft related ?'

The AJAX controls for ASP.NET are good, cool and very easy to use. Also the AJAX control toolkit for client side AJAX support is very, very nice.
But use them with caution, don't forget to learn about the basics of partial page updates, which are no more then HTTP calls to your server made by your page.

Then came Silverlight. Oh joy. After the slides and a really cool demo of what it can do, we were supposed to do the exercises. Hmmm, that were it went wrong. The course was using Silverlight 1.1, while we had Silverlight 2 BETA installed.
Need I say more ? It was a very disappointing first experience.

Today we'll be covering the last three modules of the course: Managing state, Configuration & deployment and Security. Yay :D