SharePoint, Silverlight and WCF
These are interesting times in the SharePoint space, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is on the horizon but as yet very few details have emerged. As a freelance SharePoint developer and consultant I have for some time been carefully considering which “horses to back” in terms of the technologies to skill up on and introduce into my everyday work. I believe that both Silverlight and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) will play a significant and evolving role in the future of Microsoft Office and SharePoint so I have been tracking their evolution and have been slowly and selectively introducing them into my clients’ solutions.
Today I came across the article I have been waiting for: SharePoint 2007 with WCF and Silverlight. For sometime I have been struggling to put all the pieces of the puzzle together in a deployable and supportable way and, even though this excellent article by Sahil Malik takes a bit of working through, I now have an end-to-end solution template for displaying rich UI with Silverlight interacting with the SharePoint object model through WCF services. The benefits that make this worth while for me are;
- a level of UI functionality, look and feel that users are coming to expect
- the potential to develop far more efficient SharePoint pages that don’t round trip just to update a small area on a page (jQuery and AJAX are also very definitely on my radar)
- free upgrades – Silverlight 3 is already in beta and promising even more new features, imagine the mouth watering possibilities of SharePoint with out-of-browser support!
Incidentally, I would strongly recommend that anyone interested in Silverlight for SharePoint should read Professional Microsoft SharePoint Development Using Microsoft Silverlight 2.
