Microsoft readies open-source analytics framework for Silverlight
Microsoft plans to release for download via its Codeplex site a free, open-source analytics framework for Silverlight the week of March 15.
Michael Scherotter, a Microsoft Media Experience Evangelist, is slated to share more about the framework at Microsoft's Mix 10 Web conference in Las Vegas next week.
The framework is designed to allow developers to integrate Web analytics into Silverlight applications. It will be able to track out-of-browser and offline applications, as well as support multiple analytics services from various third-party vendors, according to information on Microsoft's Mix Web site. Scherotter provided a few more details about the Silverlight Analytics Framework on his blog this week.
"The process over these past seven months has been to reach out to as many of the analytics vendors and control vendors as we could and build an inclusive framework that supports all different types of analytics that are relevant to application designers and developers," Scherotter blogged.
The new framework will support designers using Microsoft's Expression Blend tool to build applications without coding, Scherotter said. It also will work with Microsoft's SketchFlow tool and the Silverlight Media Framework.
Today, analytics for measuring the performance of a rich Internet app is often done after the fact, done incompletely or even not done at all. "Current ways to instrument applications are cumbersome, are focusing on instrumentation of Web pages and sometimes not appropriate to next generation interactive connected applications," Microsoft officials said in a March 11 post on the Silverlight Team blog. The new open-source framework will allow developers to "instrument" their applications in a deeper and easier way, officials blogged.
Mix 10 will be a showcase for Silverlight, especially Silverlight 4, which is due to ship in the first half of 2010. Silverlight is one of the keys to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 developer pitch, which company officials also are slated to discuss at next week's conference.