It’s been an interesting year, but quite a morbid one as well apparently: a lot of technologies, frameworks & principles have been declared dead, if you want to believe everything you read. Silverlight? Dead. Flash/Flex? Dead. Java? Dead by standstill and fighting. ASP .NET Webforms? Dead. .NET, even? Dead – WinRT to the rescue. And apparently Biztalk has been dead for years.

Well have you ever!

Today it came to my attention that it doesn’t stop there:

• The Web? Dead, according to Forrester.
• Apps? Dead as well!
• Or wait, no – apparently, apps are the future.

Conclusion? Well, apparently, the internet is full of crap. Of course, none of what I mentioned above is dead. If anything, we’ve never had a demand as high as this year for Silverlight & Flex, and mobile Apps in general (note: at the company I work for, we mainly build business app – your opinions may vary ;-)). Some of the stuff that’s been declared dead (HTML5) hasn’t even matured yet: demand is only going to go up, not down, the next few years.

In other words: when you’re reading yet another article on the imminent dead of a certain technology, take it with a grain of salt. If something is declared “dead”, the author probably means he or she thinks (or hopes) it will be “dead” in 3 to 5 years or so. Take a look at predictions that were made 5 years ago, and you immediately know the value (or lack of value) of these predictions.

Dead? Not really.  

As some of you might know, during the day (well... often evenings as well :)) I work at RealDolmen, one of Belgium's biggest ICT companies.  On Tuesday, September 21st we're organizing our very first SimplICiTy day, a free event about innovation in the Microsoft stack.  We've got three different tracks for those willing to attend (a business track, infrastructure track and development track), an expert bar, free food and drinks for the hungry and thirsty, ...  so if you happen to be in the neighbourhood: drop on by! :)

I will be delivering a session on Rich User Interfaces: a Logical (R)evolution.  If you want to learn about why these new technologies are quickly emerging to be the standard way to develop .NET applications, what you can do with them, what you need to start coding them yourself, ... this is the perfect session for you. 

Interested?  Don't forget to register - as said, it's all completely free!

A while ago, my company decided to launch a new marketing campaign, showing of some of the things we’ve done in the past.  To accompany this campaign, we decided to design a showcase site.  This showcase site shows of a whole lot of customer cases, technology flyers, solutions sheets, … in short: technologies and solutions we offer to our customers. 

We wanted this site to leave an immediate impression on everyone who visits it – and what better way to do that than by using Silverlight to build it, right? :-)

My team worked hard on building this site, and I hope you’ll like what we’ve come up with.  To have a look, point your browsers at http://www.realdolmen.com/customercases/!

From a technical point of view, some points of interest:

• Silverlight 3 site (frontend & backend)
• RIA Services & Entity Framework ORM
• Indexability by search engines was very important to us, so we’ve incorporated some SEO techniques
• Deep linking support
• Custom designed “Rich Text Viewer” (and editor in the backend SL app) –> the details view markup you see when you select a case is actually generated on the fly from an XML-file!