David M Smith

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David Mitchell Smith
VP & Gartner Fellow
16 years at Gartner
30 years IT industry

David Mitchell Smith is a vice president and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research, where he specializes in the impact of catalytic technologies such as the Internet, Web 2.0, cloud computing and consumer technologies. Read Full Bio

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PDC Day 2 – Silverlight steals the show!

by David M. Smith  |  November 18, 2009  |  Comments Off

 

At day 2 of Microsoft PDC09 in Los Angeles today. Time for a quick set of highlights. More to come in a lot of research in the coming days.

The overachieving announcement: Silverlight 4

The big news today is Silverlight, Specifically the beta of version 4. Siverlight continues its march towards providing moreand more of the functionality of .net, full WPF and Windows.

Version 4 includes many features for media use such as  webcam support, microphone support, offline DRM, Live streaming (including a way to stream to iphones)

It also has many features targetted at enterprise LOB uses such as printing, rich text (including rght to left display for those kind of languages), clipboard, right click,mouse wheel support, drag and drop,  hosting HTML (and other plugins like Flash). And a really big deal is the ability to compile once and deploy on Silverlight 4 and .Net 4.Tthis will open the door for many uses within enterprises.

More out of browser support. More browser support (Google Chroime). and all still in a 5MB download.  Very impressive.

So much developer emphasis with Silverlight really is in contrast to so little for Windows 7. Don’t get me wrong. Windows 7 is great and will be
very successful. But the difference between Silverlight and Windows is continuing to shrink.  Silverlight 4 also even supports multitouch as well as lots more direct hardware access.

The underachieving (non) announcement: XRM

XRM is the underlying platform technology underneath Dynamics CRM Online.  It is analogous to force.com’s origin underneath the Salesforce.com app.  Other than a brief mention of it as something that can work with Sharepoint and one session at the very bitter end of the conference, XRM was missing in action.  It is one of the more silent  but promising pieces of  Microsoft’s cloud technology. XRM is Microsoft’s only fully multitenant application platform as a service technology that runs on and off premises).  I waited until the end of the day 2 keynote to write this to make sure but for now it looks like it will continue to remain as such for a while longer.

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