I've seen a lot of speculation around the future of Silverlight and how it compares to HTML5 lately. If you've followed my posts and tweets you'll find that I still believe Silverlight is strong in the line of business area and in fact my company Wintellect is still doing quite a bit with it.
The interest is so strong that I'll be traveling to Los Angeles in a week to present at the Worldwide Partners Conference (WPC). The session speaks to the business side of Silverlight but with a very powerful message. It is a breakout session titled, "Profiting from Consumerization of IT with Windows Devices and Windows 7 Enterprise" and is on Thursday July 12th from 4:30pm to 5:30pm PST.
While I can't reveal all of the details just yet, my portion of the session is based on a case study from a very successful project our company recently completed. The client wanted to enhance the ability of their salespeople to interact with customers by providing an interactive touch experience on a Windows slate device. We built that experience in Silverlight and used it to interface with their existing backend systems. Silverlight made it easy and fast for us to develop a rich, interactive application with seamless integration to existing and new services on their backend. We were able to share development with their team while building a highly modular solution, and because of the parallel development and design it was completed in a very short time frame.
I'll post more details as they become available so that you can learn more about the case study and how Silverlight combined with the slate provided the solution they were looking for. The target device was Windows because the customer had an existing Windows infrastructure and also felt the security around Windows-based devices was much stronger than the story with competing devices like the iPad.
If you're at the conference and are able to join me I look forward to seeing you there. Otherwise, stay tuned as more details are released. I love sharing case studies with Silverlight because at the end of the day I can tell you how valuable and useful I think it is, but its the customer and their perception that ultimately determines success.
