Boldly Looking Forward with Silverlight, WPF, WP7, and Xaml

Now that the dust has settled from Build, we’re all back to our day jobs and still working on the same Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone projects that we were working on before Build. As you might have read from Todd, Doug, Vassil, Steve, or Silverlight experts like Jeremy, Dan, and Laurent, the sky has in fact not fallen and the future for .Net development on the non-Metrofied Windows 8 desktop is alive and well.  On top of that, since most of us are working on projects in the here and now and want support for multiple versions of Windows or maybe even to run on OSx, WPF and Silverlight (and even Winforms) are more important than ever for delivering applications that will run on yesterday’s Windows (yes, there are still places using XP), what we have today (Win7), and on what comes next.  We’re still excited for the "fast and fluid" interfaces that allow us to "re-imagine" our applications for the Windows 8/WinRT market – but until then we’ve all got software to deliver and we know darn well our companies aren’t going to upgrade to Win8, Metro-only en masse the minute it comes out.

With that in mind I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss some of the things that we have going on at Telerik to help support your current and future endeavors on the Xaml platforms within .Net.

New Faces

In case anyone missed his post from a few weeks ago (don’t worry, it was during Build so a few other things were happening), we’re honored to bring Michael Crump, a fellow Silverlight MVP, into the [Xaml] Evangelism team at Telerik. Michael brings with him a strong development background which of course includes a love for all things Xaml (who doesn’t love Xaml?). If you haven’t heard of him before, meaning you might have been living under a rock or something similar, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his personal blog where he’s going to continue to cover a wide variety of development topics. In fact, he did us Xaml-lovers a huge favor and collected some of the Telerik videos from Build as well as pulled out some of the more important Xaml sessions that you should be watching – so check that out (after you finish this post). Not to mention that we’re still hiring for Xaml-based positions – there is a definite investment in all Xaml platforms happening at Telerik and we aren’t slowing down one bit.

New Content

If you are reading the Telerik blogs or have seen our website in the last few weeks, I’m betting you ran across some mention of the LOB Chronicles. Rather than just drop a brand new demo on our customers we decided to take a slightly different route and bring you along for the ride from the initial planning through delivery in the Q3 timeframe. This way you can see how our development, UX, UI, marketing, and Evangelism teams all work together to bring you a final product, complete with code so you can see how we did it. Moving beyond that, or to be specific running concurrently with the LOB Chronicles, we’re revamping the entire video library for Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone. Delivering on the shared api and codebase that powers our Silverlight and WPF control suites (and has since day one), for every control that is shared across the suites you’ll get a video highlighting functionality that works in both Silverlight and WPF as well as corresponding project files so you can see the end result in action.

Stay tuned on this front as well, we’ve got a few new things brewing that will be showing up as additional resources to help the Xaml developers of today.

New Controls

This is especially for all you “Silverlight is Dead” folks out there – we’re accelerating development on a few real gems that are going to be making their first appearance in Q3 2011. Some will likely come out with a Beta tag attached as we are going to look for community feedback before finalizing on features and functionality for the v1 of the controls, but rest assured that what you see on the Silverlight and WPF roadmaps are only the tip of the iceberg.

On the Windows Phone front, everyone should be busily updating to Mango – so you can catch up with our development team. They have been all over the early Mango bits for a while now and have been working significant performance enhancements into our suite as well as new controls like the up-and-coming RadBulletGraph.  Deyan did a great job collecting this info in his post for the Q2 2011 SP1 release, so head over there for all the details.

I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that you can expect to see some of what I’m talking about in the mid-October timeframe…

Excited Yet?

We certainly are! Keep watching the site for up-and-coming changes, be sure you’re subscribed to the blogs to get the latest news first, and most importantly, let us know if there is anything you want to see included as either new features or entirely new controls in our suites in the future.

Stay tuned, there are some exciting times ahead for .Net Xaml developers!

P.S. – WinRT? Yup, we’re working on that too, take a look at what Georgi and the team have been doing with RadChart and WinRT. Ahh, the future is bright indeed for all the Xaml platforms!