Seminar on Microsoft Silverlight
Keeping the latest technology and trends, Faculty of CS&IT organized the seminar on Microsoft Silverlight Technology. The Faculty invites Mr. Fahad Khan, Engineering Director Folio3 and active member of IEEE computer science society and member of ACM and MR. Zafar Hussain Luni from PIXSENSE INC, where he is working as a software engineer to share their experience and views on this Technology.

The seminar starts with the recitation of Holy Quran. After recitation Miss. Humaira (Lecturer Faculty CS&IT) invites Mr. Fahad Khan to share his views on Silverlight. The honourable guest share views on silverlight technology about the reliability, compatibility, with the aspects of web and data servers. Then Mr. Zafar Hussain Luni is invited to share his views. Mr. Zafar Luni differentiates the Silverlight Technology Vs Flash. He briefs that this is a client side technology and Silverlight is a browser plug-in that extends the web development experience far beyond the limitations of plain HTML and JavaScript. Bringing a Microsoft product, we might expect it to work best (or only) on Windows and Internet Explorer. So we may be pleasantly surprised to know that it works equally well on Windows and on the Mac, and it also works equally well on the Firefox and Safari web browsers. Since Silverlight is a client side technology, it doesn't matter what backend server software or platform you're running - even Apache/Linux will do just fine.

Currently the lack of polished tools for developing Silverlight applications is its biggest hindrance. The next version of Visual Studio (codenamed Orcas) is expected to ship with rich Silverlight support. However, the current beta version of Orcas clearly still needs a lot of work before achieving this goal. If you're brave enough to be tinkering with the Orcas beta then you might as well download the Silverlight Tools Alpha add-on to try out its Silverlight development capabilities.

Microsoft's new Expression suite of products is currently closer to being in a finished state. They are presently more polished and less buggy than Orcas. Specifically, Expression Blend is probably the most valuable Expression product for Silverlight development. However, be forewarned that the Expression suite is intended more for graphic designers than software developers. Therefore Visual Studio-oriented developers should expect a significant learning curve.

The seminar ended with a note of thanks to the respectable guests by Mr. Abdul Hafeez khan (Lecturer CS&IT).