Friday 2 October 2009

SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Web Part, and why it is not a big deal



SharePoint 2010 Enhancements for End Users: New Silverlight Web Part & Improved UI for Adding Web Parts to a Page - SharePoint 2010 - Bamboo Nation




SharePoint 2010 Enhancements for End Users: New Silverlight Web Part & Improved UI for Adding Web Parts to a Page - SharePoint 2010 - Bamboo Nation


Bamboo Software, having seen the same demo as the rest of us, has ripped a few slides to make a piece promoting the Silverlight Web Part in 2010.

Well I have only seen the video demo from which the 2 screen grabs above come from. It seems to show that you have an OTB Silverligth Web Part, but all it does is let you place silverlight applications in your sharepoint page, not create or edit Silverlight with SharePoint content.

SharePoint can already do this, not only SharePoint 2007 but 2003 and I assume 2001. Let me show.



To prove I am not cheating I use a VM of Windows 2003 with WSS 2.0 running on Sun VirtualBox VM technology on Ubuntu Linux. The ultimate 'nothing up my sleeves kind of demo'. Here you see me installing Silverlight on the VM. (By the way this took significantly less time on VirtualBox than on VirtualPC).



I actually have created hundreds of Silverlights over the past year. Most went down with Popfly. But Photosynth is still there and seems to be growing. So I rip the silverlight Photosynth from my Photosynth.com page.



Now I just edit a simple content web editor web part.



Just past the URL for the Photosynth Silverlight in to the html editor



And you have a WSS 2.0 site running a rich silverlight 3-D photosynth.

So as it stands today the entire Silverlight Web Part in 2010 just streamlines function that already exists in in SharePoint 2003 and 2007.

Very disappointing.

What I wanted was something like Popfly that would allow Silverlight mashups of Sharepoint material for projects. As of right now you don't have that.