Apr
13
2011

The State of the Blog: Please Welcome HTML and JQuery to the Party

Since this blog first opened in June of 2009 it has been named The Elephant and the Silverlight. The name came from John Godfrey Saxe’s The Blind Men and the Elephant. At the time, WCF RIA Services was all about Silverlight and people were arguing about just what WCF RIA Services and Silverlight were. The name made sense at the time.

However, this blog has really always been about WCF RIA Services, Silverlight was just along for the ride. Here in 2011, WCF RIA services isn’t just about Silverlight anymore. With the release of RIA/JS, HTML is joining Silverlight as a fully functional client of WCF RIA Services. While I am still primarily a Silverlight programmer, I will be expanding my coverage and my community support efforts to include the HTML platform. So, the name of this blog is changing to just The RIA Services Blog to reflect the new platform agnostic approach I will be taking around here.

So, to the HTML JQuery programmers out there, welcome to my blog. Please cut me some slack, it will take me a little while to get fully up to speed on this whole JQuery thing but I am eager to learn.

To my fellow Silverlight developers, don’t worry I am not going anywhere. I still strongly believe in Silverlight and most of my development efforts will continue to be in the Silverlight space. I think there is an opportunity with RIA/JS for us Silverlight developers to show how easy it would be to create fallback HTML versions of our Silverlight applications so that we can get the best of both worlds. Silverlight for the platforms that support it, and HTML for the platforms that don’t. With tools like RIA/JS, maybe this dual approach will not mean actually writing the application twice.

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