Friday, April 4th, 2008
ASP.Net Ajax Site and Silverlight
Category: Microsoft
This is an interesting one. If you go to learn about ASP.Net Ajax at the Microsoft site itself you not only see info about the product, including this:
ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating efficient and interactive Web applications that work across all popular browsers.
ASP.NET AJAX is built-into ASP.NET 3.5. It is also available as a separate download for ASP.NET 2.0.
But, you may get a full screen modal popup that tells you how much better Silverlight is than anything the Open Web has to offer ;) NOTE: Some people see this, and others do not.
I don’t see this when I go to Adobe Spry. There is no “FLEX FLEX FLEX” message.
How do you feel about that?
-882352938.6 rating from 34 votes
The difference here, of course, is that Adobe already has 98+% market penetration for its plugin. Microsoft is still trying to bootstrap.
Either way, it’s an hilarious juxtaposition and I do feel a bit sorry for the Atlas team at having their hard work co-opted like this. Guess we know what’s “strategic” now.
Regards
It seems like the same poeplel that do Atlas do Silverlight, at least that is the impression I get from their blogs.
A bit unfortunate since I have not seen much progress on the Ajax front since Silverlight.
Just hope they bring it to the iPhone! :-)
I didn’t get this when running Firefox 3 Beta (my default browser), but sure enough I get this in Internet Explorer 8 Beta. So what browser are you running Dion? :)
Appears for me on IE7, Vista. Maybe I’m just the lucky lottery winner selected to experience Silverlight.
Maybe they’ve worked out they’re unlikely to win over Opera/FF users to Silverlight? :)
All who knows me can confirm that I have said for almost a year now that ASP.NET AJAX is nothing more than the “launch campaign for Silverlight”… ;)
When I see Silverlight, it makes me think, “this is the reason we won’t get native SVG in IE…”
What is Flex… ?
Don’t be another MS hater website please…. :(
To be fair to the ASP.NET site, this modal window comes up on *every* Microsoft website that has Silverlight content or enhancement. Overall I’m against popups of any sort as they’re pretty annoying, but I can understand Microsoft wanting to push installs (besides, already have Silverlight installed on all of my computers because it rocks and I don’t get that window ;-).
I agree with posure. This is simply to allow the user to view the silverlight content. Not a completely extraneous sales pitch. I’ve seen the same thing on flash sites when a newer version is required. I’m not sure they even say anything about any other product in the popup. Merely that that website will improve if you install Silverlight.
But who knows maybe i’m missing something.
Half the point of Ajax is so that we can create rich applications without having to depend on proprietary plugins like Flash or Sliverlight. Pushing unnecessary / gratuitous use of these plugins is, in my opinion, annoying to users and harmful to the web. Unfortunately, both Adobe and Microsoft have every incentive to do so, since it makes them money.
Fortunately, with so many excellent JavaScript frameworks to choose from, and browser technology steadily (rapidly in most cases!) improving, Flash and Silverlight can and should be used as a last resort, rather than a primary strategy.