Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Where to find good Silverlight applications

analysis
Nov 20, 20082 mins

Silverlight is new enough that you need to know where to look to see worthwhile examples

In my Silverlight 2 review, I neglected to discuss where to find good Silverlight applications. While you can find thousands of Flash applications (good and bad) all over the Web, Silverlight is still new enough that you need to know where to look to see worthwhile examples. This says a lot about product maturity, but nothing about product capabilities.

silverlight 1
The obvious first place to look is the official Silverlight home page . Near the top left of the page, there is a small gallery.

Hover over a site at the bottom of this area, and press the “See It” button without accidentally hovering over a different site. The “See More…” link in this area and the Showcase option at the top of the page both go to http://silverlight.net/Showcase, which currently links to 266 applications.

Not every good Silverlight application is listed in the showcase. For example, Jeff Prosise and his son recently developed an Enigma simulator. You can download the code from here. If you simply want to run the simulator, click here. I found this quite impressive.

Enigma
Charles Petzold has written an enhancement to Jeff’s simulation to do a more realistic simulation of the patch cables. The source code is here: CableExperiment-Silverlight.zip , and the Silverlight version is here: CableExperiment.html . Charles also did a WPF version; the difference between the two versions illustrates some of the useful functionality in WPF that is missing in Silverlight.

Enjoy!

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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