Bridging the Office Divide

Computers are becoming more important as communications devices than as machines that process operations. To get the best functionality out of your technology, I recommend adopting a Service Oriented Architecture approach.

SOA Defined

Service-Oriented Architecture is a methodology followed by IT departments to break down their resources into modules. This approach increases their business agility by creating loosely coupled business processes integrated across a business. Service orientation ties together and bridges information across multiple platforms and utilizes a wide range of technologies and communication protocols, such as XML, web services, simple object access protocol (SOAP), and so forth.

The simplest example of this is the way the different discrete programs within Microsoft’s Office suite interact. If you add a contact in MSN Messenger, and that person then sends you an email you open in Outlook, the program recognizes that this is a known contact and can inform you if . Both programs interact with the same contact information service, making it unnecessary to keep separate contact lists.

What is Silverlight?

Microsoft’s Silverlight is a direct competitor to Adobe Flash. But what is it, and should web developers bother to learn to use it?

Microsoft’s Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E) is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation rich internet applications (RIAs) and .NET-based media experience for the web. It enables the creation of rich, interactive and visually stunning applications which can run on multiple platforms — the the next step in evolving the potential richness of user experiences on the web.

With Silverlight, Microsoft has moved onto Adobe’s turf — the plug-in is a direct competitor of Adobe’s popular Flash player. So what’s so great about this new technology, and does it represent a real threat to Flash?

For starters, Silverlight is based on Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0 and eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML) which lies at the core of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). These are widely used and understood by developers, so developers will not need to learn anything knew to work in Silverlight.