Partner Innovation Briefing: Developing Rich Internet Applications

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On October 1st (in Vancouver), 7th (in Montreal) and 9th (in Toronto) of 2008, Jamie Wakeam and I are presenting a series of Innovation Briefings on Developing Rich Internet Applications. 

It’s fair to say that a large share of applications built today use the internet in some fashion.  It’s also fair to say that many of those applications use the internet as a medium for consuming services to make the application more compelling.  Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are a rapidly becoming a preferred way for building user-centric solutions to various business problems today.  It is also a way of extending the reach of your solution in ways that were not practical even 3-5 years ago.  Todays applications can use the internet as a medium to consume services and present the information important to the user in the form of rich software. 

You may have heard Microsoft using the term Software Plus Services in the past.  It's a mantra that we at Microsoft have taken seriously as we see it being the way applications will be built in the future.  Software, whether it be on the desktop, browser, mobile device or some other channel, will consume services in the cloud and present that information in a way that will make the user excited to use the solution and make them more productive.

This briefing is all about preparing you as a developer with the presentation technologies to harness the power of user experience and consume services in the cloud.  The technologies we talk about in this briefing are:

  • Windows Presentation Foundation
  • ASP.NET 3.5
  • Silverlight 2
  • Internet Explorer 8

If you are joining us for this session, we look forward to seeing you there!  If you have a great Software Plus Services solution already, both Jamie and I would love to hear more about it.

If you couldn't join us for the session in the city nearest you, not to worry.  We will be holding a webcast on the content from the Internet Explorer 8 session (link to come soon) and we will be recording each portion of this talk as a screen cast and provide it to you as a Silverlight Streaming video (links to this will be provided sometime after the briefing tour is complete).

Many of you will be interested in getting a copy of the deck we are presenting.  The site can be found here along with the demo code from the presentation as well.

Some of you had questions regarding some of the topics that we discussed during the presentation.  Below are some of the answers to these questions:

Q1.   For Internet Explorer 8, does InPrivate mode override the internet safety policies within Windows Vista (i.e.:  does InPrivate mode override any safety features and policies parents may implement in Windows Vista for their children)?

A1.   No, InPrivate browsing does not hide or override any policies that you may implement on Windows Vista.  Parental control policies are a lower state (i.e.:  higher priority) function of Windows Vista so this ensures that those policies are adhered to regardless of whether someone is using InPrivate browsing or not.

Q2.   Can Silverlight applications be crawled by spiders for search engines and indexed in their search databases?

A2.   Absolutely.  There is a great write-up about this in Nikhil Kothari's blog.  There is also a great whitepaper on implementing Web Analytics for Silverlight on Michael Scherotter's blog.

Q3.   Where can I find a good comparison of all the WPF DataGrid implementations on the web?

A3.   Check this blog post out.  (Many thanks to Laurent Duveau for the link!)

-Paul