Silverlight 2.0 in Action

Silverlight has now existed for quite sometime, but, I came to know the real power of Silverlight when it was showcased in MIX 2008 this march. There were some real cool apps that were shown running on Silverlight 2.0. One of the most exciting of them was the NBC website for Olympics that has been developed in Silverlight and will eventually be hosted on IIS 7. Boy! you really should check that website once it's out in the open. The media and data streaming is enhanced hugely with Silverlight along with cool features of IIS 7 media bit throttling. This will soon be giving us some real good pictures of the coming Olympics (controversy or no controversy, This one's good!)

Well anyways after MIX '08 I din't get to see any cool silverlight apps out in action ... Until I came accross http://bigweekend.external.bbc.co.uk/ while surfing on the net. I thought there was no better chance than this to show all you people how great user expirience can be made by using Silverlight 2.0.

The real picture that is being used in this app is the one just below.
Now if you take a careful look, you will notice that I have marked the numbers 1 & 2 in red. The numbers are not very well formatted, but, you need to give me credit as i am writing this blog at 4 in the morning ;).Well those are the 2 spots that I wanted to zoom into. Why?? hmmm just for the heck of it. Well it turns out not really. I wanted to check as to how much I could actually zoom into this Silverlight application, to try and figure out the real power out of this technology. The picture that I have attached is pretty small and not of real resolution & size. If you want to take a look at the real thing go check it out at http://bigweekend.external.bbc.co.uk/. At first if you do not have silverlight installed, the application will not be loaded up instead you will be notified to install Silverlight 2.0 plugin into your browser. You should know that Silverlight is still in it's Beta phase so I am not sure if it will work at all conditions, however, I have tried this on Firefox and IE 7, it works just fine. But , enough of this, the cool thing is what happens when I zoom to the location 1 & 2? Check the pictures below for the result.














As you can see the number that you see is the picture at the left is that of the car where in I have marked 1. And the picture that showcases all the artist is the place where I have marked the 2 in the main picture. More important, keep in check the speed at which you are able to perform these actions. It's real quick!!

This is just one out of some many examples that are already being worked upon by Silverlight 2.0. If you think that it's good enough to be experienced, below are some of the most important links to the Silverlight World!

• Silverlight at Microsoft.com
  

• Install Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 from here
  

• Website for beginners, advanced and experts - Silverlight.net - This is a great resource if you want to hit it off bigtime with Silverlight.
  

• To check out the sessions held on Silverlight during MIX '08 visit here

BTW I love the Silverlight slogan - Light Up The Web ;)

As Always, do write in your comments and let me know if you need anymore info on this subject.