Presumptions of Future of SharePoint and Silverlight Together

January 31, 2012  |   Posted in Sharepoint      Tags: sharepoint development, sharepoint services, Sharepoint Solutions

SharePoint and Silverlight together make a great combination of technologies for developing splendid web applications.

With SharePoint, users can easily create and configure their own web-based collaboration and publishing solutions, and with the help of Silverlight they can incorporate better user interface components.

Microsoft Silverlight was launched in the year 2007 as an answer and competitor of Adobe Flash. It’s an application framework to build rich web applications. While SharePoint is latest application environment by which business users can innovate and build simple solutions on their own in a most secured way.

Somehow, developers utilize Silverlight now as a tool for building rich Webparts. Most admired example is Webparts containing videos and various media players which make use of Silverlight’s ability for delivering a good quality video on the internet. The media webparts of SharePoint 2010 is actually a Silverlight control. Also, there are number of third party webparts present that actually use Silverlight to network with pictures and audio in much more interesting ways. Some generic webparts are also present in SharePoint 2010 that can be used to host a specific Silverlight app by easily referencing the document library URL it was deployed to. Moreover, for providing efficient and smooth experience to end users, the interface of SharePoint 2010 makes use of Silverlight.

SharePoint and Silverlight should be better together for number of reasons. They both are actually based on .NET framework and also share a common development tool, that is, Visual Studio 2010. This helps developers to learn about them and also simplifies the process of development. A solution of Visual Studio 2010 can have both SharePoint as well as Silverlight projects, and the output received from the Silverlight project can be also incorporated automatically to the SharePoint deployment package.

Using SharePoint with Silverlight can simplify the Silverlight apps and gives more flexibility to users. In December last year Silverlight Version 5 released GPU accelerated video decoding and 64 bit support. This version is considered as the final release of Silverlight.

If it is accepted that Silverlight version 5 is really the final release, what will happen then in the future of SharePoint. Nobody is aware that what would be the replacement for it, but most probably it seems to be HTML5. Microsoft is trying its best to bring back HTML5 for web development. In fact, Windows 8 is using HTML5 as its application platform. Seeing this, there are full chances that the next version of SharePoint will consider it in future.

Though Silverlight is been a powerful and useful tool for rich media and interfaces, it is predicted that it will disappear totally from the next version of SharePoint. There is full possibility that SharePoint 2012 might adopt HTML5 for all the purposes it is currently using Silverlight for.

We provide web design and web development services using the advanced technology – Microsoft Silverlight and end to end SharePoint Solutions starting from planning to design to implementation. Contact us at info@softwebsolutions.com for knowing more about our SharePoint services and if you are looking for building rich internet application leveraging MS Silverlight.