Zoom-in Online

While much of the focus in the RIA wars has been between Silverlight and Flash, last year Adobe flanked Microsoft with Adobe AIR and pushed forward on an important RIA battlefront unopposed. Adobe AIR let RIA applications integrate with the native operating system, appear as normal applications outside a browser, and offer a consolidated uninstall experience apropos to the user's OS. In other words, developers could get the benefits of an RIA platform (non-privileged install experience, auto-update, cross-platform support, and more) while creating an illusion for the end-user that the application is installed locally just like any other.

With Silverlight 3, Microsoft takes their RIA platform out of the browser and aims to reclaim territory ceded to Adobe AIR. 

With Silverlight 3, developers can build offline-aware applications that detect network status changes via an event and synchronize changes to server data made while offline using Silverlight 3's new client data features. Out of browser applications can auto-update and can be uninstalled via the native OS uninstall facility.

However comments made by the speakers during the keynote did imply that the out-of-browser applications will still have to observe the same browser sandbox rules as standard Silverlight applications (such as maximum number of simultaneous connections, cross-domain restrictions, limited port ranges for socket communications, and the like).

As developers in financial services, my colleagues and I at Lab49 have seen many financial institutions select Silverlight over WPF in recent months for both client-facing and internal line of business applications for reasons that mostly come down to ease of deployment, auto-update, and an increasingly browser-based intranet culture. With Silverlight 3, many of the advantages of WPF in this market (improved user experience during install and startup, hardware acceleration, and the like) are likely to be wiped away. I would expect that in financial services (as well as more broadly across large enterprises) that an out-of-browser Silverlight application will rank highest in their preferences for new projects over WPF, Adobe AIR, and "classic" browser-based Silverlight.