How to make Microsoft Silverlight enterprise fit
A father and son team think they’ve found a way to make Microsoft Silverlight more enterprise friendly.
Navot and Gai Peled who run Gizmo, Ltd., an Israeli startup, enabled their Visual WebGui environment to run any Silverlight application without loading Silverlight’s thick client on the user’s desktop. Instead, Visual WebGui redirects Silverlight calls to a server for processing. Silverlight is Microsoft’s plug-in for rich interactive applications on the Web, similar to AJAX.
Doubling interesting is that the software brings Windows Forms development to Silverlight, simplifying application creation and deployment. Today, SilverLight development does not take advantage of the drag-and-drop environment available in Visual Basic or other development tools.
CEO Navot Peled, the father, acknowledges that the sending calls across the network may in theory make the application more sensitive to network latency, but in practice that’s likely not going to be the case. “VisualWebGui runs 1 Kbyte/s per action, which is very light compared to other such systems.”
The software is currently available and the basic programming library is for free. Additional extensions for Silverlight run $200 to $500 a piece. There are 40 extensions in total.