Dear all,

Many of you have asked us lately and I also had a couple of direct inquiries about our intentions regarding Silverlight and its roadmap. So I thought I would update you on our recent decisions for Silverlight implementation.

Ever since we have started implementing Silverlight presentation layer back in early '08 (Initially with Silverlight 1.1), the Silverlight API and basic infrastructures have been proved to be  moving targets, and we found ourselves investing large efforts relatively in order to base Visual WebGui client kernel all over again on each version, minor and even in between early drops...

I wanted to let you know that we haven't abandon the Silverlight presentation layer and we are even considering to implement other presentation layers such as Flex/Flash for the days to come, however, currently Visual WebGui teams are focused on stabilizing the first DHTML release version 6.4, targeting the end of Q1 2010 for a first RC version and we are all heads down on this mission until after 6.4 becomes rock stable.

Having said that, we are temporarily freezing the work towards support for Silverlight based presentation, until 2 major events have occurred:

1. DHTML 6.4 version reaches rock stable release stage.

2. Silverlight API becomes more mature and reaches a stage where we can count on a certain level of backwards compatibility.

(Official sources say that the current SL 4.0 developers preview version might change about 15%-20% of its basic API until it reaches release stages)

Looking forward we strongly believe in the value of VWG running graphically rich presentation layers, lending its architectural benefits to  Silverlight, Flash and HTML5 and we stay fully committed to implement them once they mature.   

I hope that this shades some light on the subject and that you guys understand our considerations.

Please feel free to respond and comment, we are always open for ideas and thoughts!

Yours,

Itzik Spitzen

I have the same opinion about Silverlight investments: let's wait until it get's stable enough so we don't have to redo our applications eveytime there is a new version.

In the mean time there are two anoying side effects:

• the catalog sample application in 6.4 beta "kind a works" in Silverlight 3
• the Silverlight demos on VWG site refuse to run altogether.

I think a notice.txt like the above should be included in the download "VWG_Catalog_Sample*" files so developers won't loose to much time investigating the problems.

The Silverlight demos on the site should state clearly the Silverlight version needed (I guess it's Silverlight 2) or be disabled temporarily. As it is, people will conclud VWG is second grade product: "if the public demos don't run, I will never get my application developed to run". 

Hi,

Why not put the Silverlight framework full open source. The community could help you to fix bugs.

Benjamin.