Real World .NET 4, C#, and Silverlight®: Indispensible Experiences from 15 MVPs

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Silverlight — The Silver Lining for Line-of-Business Applications

by Jeremy Likness

Archeologists claim that humans mastered fire approximately 400,000 years ago. Controlled blazes warmed early tribes as they moved into cooler regions and used their flames to hold predators at bay. Generations later, I would smile at the irony that I was investing most of my time putting out fires. I was the development manager of a team that wrote software to help companies manage their mobile devices. It seemed that the browsers were managing us as we spent more and more time testing, writing, and reworking code to achieve the holy grail of cross-browser compatibility.

The aptly named “Acid” tests allude to the corrosive and loose interpretation of standards intended to drive the consistent rendering of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents on any platform or browser. You can visit the www.acidtests.org site to run the tests that can mercilessly pound your computer with standards-based tags and JavaScript to produce a smiling face that happily declares, “This browser is compliant.”

Most browsers failed these tests miserably when they were first released, while line-of-business (LOB) application developers independently discovered that building a rich online experience involved more than just quality code and smart design. Too many honest ASP.NET developers were unwillingly dragged into the realm of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and JavaScript “hacks.” They were left worn, haggard, and irritated ...