Cross-Platform .NET Business Applications?

10 commentsWritten on March 19th, 2009 by
Categories: Silverlight

Was just going over the new Silverlight 3 features. One thing in particular that i find very interesting: the out-of-browser capabilities:

The new out of browser experience in Silverlight 3 enables users to place their favorite Silverlight applications directly onto their PC and Mac, with links on the desktop and start menu—all without the need to download an additional runtime or browser plug-in.

So we can create .NET applications that run on the Mac now :)

Sure, they'll be sandboxed and you can't do everything a real native application could do, but this could still be a pretty compelling deployment choice.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 08:59 and is filed under Silverlight. You can subscribe to any comments to this entry via RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://budts.be/weblog/ teranex

    So actually it is the same as Adobe Air, with the difference that it is bundled in one download while Adobe Air and Flash are two seperate downloads?
    Adobe Air can be useful so the Silverlight variant will be useful also i think.

    Sure, they’ll be sandboxed and you can’t do everything a real native application could do

    So this means you cannot open files from the local system by example? That makes it a lot less useful I think… Adobe Air can do this and i think it is one reason why it is rather successful. it enables flash developers to create cool-looking applications, that behave like real applications and can do all the stuff you want a real application to do.
    If Silverlight-out-of-the-browser can’t do this, i think it becomes a lot less useful. In fact you could as well have installed Mozilla Prism (or a similar tool), open the webpage with silverlight in it, and click ‘create desktop application’, which puts a short-cut on the desktop and in the startmenu and runs that webpage in a seperate window. This works even with Silverlight < 3.

  • pho

    well actually, silverlight 3 has detached functionality. so you can run it while not actually connected to the internet and have it ‘sync’ afterwards.
    you can make a trimmed down ‘smart client’ this way. pretty nice!

  • http://benpittoors.wordpress.com den Ben

    flash developers … cool-looking applications, that behave like real applications

    So they are _not_ real! They just behave that way…
    This really cracks me up :)

  • Matt

    Mono is also great for this. IIRC, the later builds can run winforms apps using the native Mac drawing APIs.

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    i honestly have very little faith in mono

  • RCE

    I think mono is a great initiative – but not for complex (i.e. business) projects.

  • alwin

    i honestly have very little faith in mono

    Could you explain why?

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    @Alwin

    Nothing but bad experiences with it in the past actually. Granted, that was around 2006 somewhere so it must’ve improved a lot by now (i could only hope so). But i spend a few months working with it, and just ran into a lot of issues. And not even about certain parts not being implemented or anything like that, but actual behavioral differences between mono and microsoft’s .NET… at the time, there was a difference in behavior between MS .NET and Mono’s Hashtable implementation when using a key that didn’t have an item. That never should’ve happened in the first place, but there was actual GTK# code that already made assumptions on the faulty behavior.

    I also ran into a huge memory leak with their regex implementation. The app i was working on at the time had to use regex pretty much all the time (hundreds of matches per second)… the same code on MS .NET did not leak memory whereas with Mono the memory usage would increase heavily all the time. The Mono guys didn’t consider it to be a true memory leak, so they didn’t fix it (at least not at the time).

    A lot of stuff in Mono is nice, but when you venture beyond the little desktop apps and the hello world examples you quickly run into problems, or at least, at the time i did.

    All in all, the entire experience left me with very little faith in the mono team’s ability to make this a viable alternative.

    And then there’s the fact that they will always be behind… how long did it take them to get WinForms working, if it actually works properly by now? And who even cares about WinForms these days? Does WPF work? What about Silverlight? Can i write WCF Services? Some things will work, other won’t. But it will never be a complete alternative to Microsoft’s .NET.

    Granted, what they have achieved is pretty impressive, and for some applications mono definitely can be a viable alternative. But i think in general, it will always be a niche player. That is of course only my opinion and would love to be proven wrong about this a few years from now :)

  • http://www.filip.duyck.org Filip Duyck

    From what I’ve seen, this “out-of-browser” mode is barely more than what you’d get today with Prism or Google Chrome when you promote web pages to applications.

    @Pho: Would that require you to leave the program running, or does it have some kind of isolated storage where it can persist the uncommitted changes until synchronisation occurs ?

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    @Filip

    from what i’ve read, the network awareness and synch features work when the app is running, but you do have the ability to write to isolated storage… the amount of data in isolated storage for out of browser clients is set to 25MB though

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