SharePoint line of business to your desktop, already here?
March 28th, 2009
Well, I haven’t written in a while.
Until last week, I’ve had virtually no interest in Microsoft Silverlight, disregarding it as nothing more than a Flash wannabe. In retrospect, rather hypocritical of me considering I’m a lover of all alternative solutions and Silverlight being not actually that horrible in practice and of course free to develop with. Then Beta 3 is announced and suddenly Silverlight is on my radar. The next version of SharePoint (Let’s call it SharePoint Office 13.5 ho-ho! he laughed knowingly at his own obscure joke*) will almost certainly include SiverLight integration of some sort, what has me jumping about in my chair and saying to people “Do you see?” is the desktop integration feature. Ripped unashamably from Adobe air, and already completely possible with Java classes and the like, Silverlight 3′s desktop integration allows you to install a Silverlight application from the browser into the desktop allowing you to continue to work with it offline and such. How soon will we see LOB SharePoint webparts which we can install on the desktop?
Why wait? I have already downloaded and installed the SDK, Microsoft Expression, marvelled at XAML and XAP and followed the early but simple tutorials which identify how desktop integration is switched on.
Whether this can be integrated into the SharePoint API and deployed from within a SharePoint page remains to be seen. Watch this space, or indeed try it out yourself and if you do get it working before me (I have actually decided not to try yet, just to let the dream live on in my head a little bit longer) please leave a comment here so we may marvel at your technical skills.
*Update: They went for SharePoint 2010 in the end, wise move
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