Silverlight: The Browser as the New Desktop

Microsoft Silverlight has been generating excitement with its release of 2.0, which Microsoft calls one of the most comprehensive solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser. About one in four machines worldwide now has Silverlight installed, and some four million developers have already upgraded to the new version. For financial services institutions, this new release means essentially that they are one step closer to being able to put desktop performance and flexibility on the Web. To find out how financial services institutions can best tap Silverlight’s benefits, Windows in Financial Services turned to Eikos Partners’ David Lattimore-Gay.

WFS: Explain why Silverlight is such a big deal.

DLG: Silverlight provides a rich development environment, in which developers can use their existing skills acquired while developing desktop applications, and utilize them to build out RIA applications.

WFS: What are some of the top benefits of Silverlight for financial services institutions?

DLG: It enables financial services institutions to leverage an existing pool of developer talent that already know C#, WPF, WCF, and LINQ. It provides for a much shorter learning curve to go from that environment to Silverlight. Skills as well remain localized to one or two languages, rather than spread across multiple languages and environments. In addition, there are huge cost savings that can be achieved given that Silverlight is based on the same core technologies as WPF, and is familiar to .NET developers.

WFS: Banks still are using the Internet for utility purposes rather than using it to sell new products. What guidance can you give as to the right approach to upgrading banks’ online presence?

DLG: Banks should choose a technology stack that allows for rapid evolution of the online experience as well as leverages the existing C# development pool. Selecting Silverlight as the technology would provide a great backbone to a bank’s online presence.

WFS: Is there a wrong approach?

DLG: Allowing the splintering of your technology choices adds a maintenance and support burden. It also dilutes the IT staff’s knowledgebase, which adds to costs.

WFS: Companies are reassessing their IT investments in an effort to dramatically cut costs. At the same time they are facing high expectations from sophisticated, Web savvy customers. How do you advise striking that balance?

DLG: Review the technology utilized within the company, and then consolidate down to a few key choices, perhaps ASP.Net and Silverlight for Web development, WPF for desktop applications, and .NET for back-end services. This allows for your development staff to focus on a single technology stack. This also makes it much easier for staff to move between projects. In addition, it keeps head count down, and it reduces maintenance and support costs while improving developers’ knowledge of the technology.

WFS: Where do you think we will be 18 months from now?

DLG: Silverlight will be as pervasive as Flash is today. It also will have gone through one, possibly two iterations. Functionally, Silverlight and WPF will have merged closer together, perhaps even become a single environment. This will make it possible to build in either and deploy in the other. Silverlight applications also will no longer be a prisoner of the browser. It will run from the desktop, like a traditional application, with all of the hooks to allow for updates to be pulled and deployed automatically to the environment. Deeper integration with technologies like WCF, elements that we take for guaranteed in WPF, will be available in Silverlight, i.e., the Visual Brush. The demand for more and more applications to be run from the Web, verses needing to be installed on the desktop, will increase and Silverlight will have stepped up to the demand, offering a seamless user experience.

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