SILVERLIGHT的价值所在

微软的SILVERLIGHT技术是备受关注的，很多开发人员都开始努力学习这项新技术和Expression系列工具。我希望把下面的这篇文档共享给大家，以便大家更深刻的了解SILVERLIGHT技术。我相信看完这篇文章的朋友们会有启发，对如何把SILVERLIGHT学好，用好，让技术真正创造价值，会有帮助。在埋头进入技术细节之前，拜托各位一定要先了解技术的价值，因为它将成为我们自己价值的体现！

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正文（抱歉正文为英文，但我觉得我们的技术人员阅读起来难度并不大）：

We all know that great experiences drive consumer choice. And for many of the people in this room, creating and delivering those experiences is the reason you get up in the morning – and the foundation of the business you’re in.

Creativity and strategy are the foundations for great experiences, but software plays a crucial – and growing – role in how those experiences lead to solid business results.

Let’s take a look at what it takes to create a great experience and how it can make an impact on your bottom line…

Now more than ever, experiences are about much more than “look and feel”…

Great experiences are those that look great and work flawlessly.

They entertain and engage, with rich, contextual and relevant content.

They are easy to use.

And they ensure reliability, performance and security, under real-world pressures of scale and complexity.

The best experiences are deeply connected to the companies and brands they represent – they’re not just billboards, they’re windows and doors through which customers should be able to see and interact with your business and your brand in a substantial way.

Customers want exciting, rich, responsive and complete experiences.

You want to build and maintain those experiences quickly and inexpensively – and get the results you need.

But it’s more complicated than it should be. Let’s look at a few reasons why…

On the Web, we’re building great experiences every day, but we’re doing it with tools that have their roots in an earlier era of the Internet.

Most of the tools we use date from a time when the Web was about “content,” but today’s experiences need the power of software: not only to deliver the richness and interactivity users want, but also to connect those experiences to the business systems that matter, to deliver those experiences reliably at a massive scale, and to do it all with an eye towards the bottom line: cost and time to market.

It’s time to put the full power of software to work on delivering great experiences.

One way today’s experiences are more like software these days is that they never stand alone – they are the doors and windows to many different systems and processes that support the business and the brand.

For example, consider a typical product configurator, which lets users really get to know the product, play around with it and customize it to their needs. The second the customer hits the “buy” button, that great experience needs to start talking to the inventory and billing systems that will process their payment and ship their product, and the CRM system that connects this product with anything else they’ve bought.

The fact is, once your great experience starts to deliver results – whether that’s user engagement that needs to be tracked, analyzed and monetized, or purchases that need to be processed – you are now in the software business.

The good news is that Microsoft is pretty good at solving these kinds of tough software problems. We’ve been doing it for more than 30 years. That’s why we’re extending the power of software to tackle the challenges you face in creating great experiences.

We’re helping you quickly, efficiently, and profitably create great experiences wherever your customers are – on the Web, on their desktop, on their mobile phone – and also bring those experiences to new places, whether it’s game consoles, new interactive devices like Surface, or new form factors that haven’t yet been invented.

We’re innovating on the tools and platforms for you to deliver great experiences in every aspect – not only the rich, exciting and engaging experiences customers see, but also the processes and workflows and supporting technologies that help you build great experiences quickly and easily, deliver them reliably to wherever your customers want them, and translate those experiences into real business results.

Let’s look at a few examples of how Microsoft is helping companies get the most out of the experiences they create…

Hard Rock Café has built their brand on its massive collection of memorabilia – more than 70,000 pieces of rock and roll history displayed at 146 restaurants and venues around the world.

They wanted to drive home the authenticity of this brand, give users a sense of the depth of their collection, and differentiate themselves from mass-market theme restaurants and hotel chains – so they launched a new brand campaign and Web site that brings all of these artifacts and memories to life.

They chose Silverlight not only because it was able to handle such a large collection scalably and reliably, but also because of Deep Zoom, a Silverlight feature that allows people to see images on the Web like they’ve never seen them before – visualizing huge amounts of information and enabling people to intuitively dive further and further into the image. This was the only way for Hard Rock to give visitors a mosaic of every single piece of their collection – two billion pixels and counting – and inspire them to click and explore to see the details and learn the story behind all that history.

And, most amazingly: by working on the Microsoft platform, they built the content management system and infrastructure to deliver this great experience in just 30 days.

More details: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002432

Sponsorships can be a very effective way to maintain and extend a brand – but only if people know about them.

As a major sponsor of professional bass fishing, Toyota wanted to make sure its content was front and center for any fishing enthusiasts on the Web.

This means keeping their content at or near the top of the results for anyone searching for bass fishing, or information about any of the professional anglers that Toyota sponsors. But their old site, which was developed in Flash, only appeared in search results against two keywords.

So they chose to re-build their Web experience with Silverlight, which helped make their site content far more visible to search engines. They rebuilt the site in just eight weeks, and shortly afterwards their site now appeared in results against 78 keywords. And, if that’s not enough, switching to Silverlight also reduced their time to update the site by 75%.

AOL wanted to differentiate AOL Mail, already one of the world’s most widely-used e-mail services, though a renewed focus on personalization – “making e-mail who you are.”

They wanted their Webmail client to deliver a far richer experience, with more options to “skin” the interface to the user’s tastes or brand it for sponsorships. However, they also needed to do this in a way that looked great and worked great – offering excellent performance without requiring a large download.

That’s why they chose to build their next-generation e-mail application on Silverlight – it offered a rich, customizable experience across platforms and browsers, while also delivering twice the performance of other platforms.

The team was able to take this idea from the whiteboard to its first beta in just six months of development.

The Gyao video-on-demand site is one of the top 10 most visited sites in Japan, with more than 16 million users. Although new content is added to the site every day, it wasn’t being accessed nearly as much as it could. To get the most out of their investments in content, they needed better ways to visualize and present the clips and trailers on their front page.

So they built the New Movie Arrival Station using Silverlight, which was the only way they could create a rich browsing and visualization experience across browsers and platforms while maintaining the integrity of their Windows Media content. They launched in January of 2008 – and within two weeks, 80% of their user base had installed Silverlight and begun using the feature.

To bring the richness and excitement of the Olympics to its Web audiences, NBC needed a solution that not only offered an interactive, high-definition experience, but also was capable of reliably handling the massive user demand and real-time streaming requirements of such a large-scale event.

They chose Silverlight because it can playback live content with HD quality, with the ability to integrate real-time blogging, video alerts, and rich data overlays – offering a superior experience for their audience, with greater user “stickiness.” Additionally, streaming media is delivered to Silverlight from Windows Media Server 2008 which offers the scalability and reliability required for an Olympic-sized event.

Over 17 days, the NBC Olympics Web site had 1.3 billion page views, more than 50 million unique visitors watching more than 10 million hours of video. And while sites using other technologies to stream Olympics content had an average viewing time of three minutes per user, the average time on the NBC Olympics site was 27 minutes.

These are just a few examples of how companies are building on a comprehensive, integrated platform of Microsoft technologies to create rich, high-quality experiences.

Let’s take a look at one of these technologies – Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight powers rich application experiences wherever the Web works.

Silverlight gives you what you need to light up the Web.

You can deliver compelling, exciting, discoverable experiences, with all the features and capabilities you expect, like vector graphics, animation, styling and skinning, and some new things that weren’t possible before.

Keep users on your site longer and make the most of your content through flawless media experiences, with high-definition video and smooth on-demand streaming.

Build user “buzz” and differentiate yourself with innovative technologies that push the boundaries of interactivity and gives you new ways to explore your brand.

Silverlight builds on industrial-strength Microsoft tools and platforms that ensure stability, scalability, accessibility, reliability, security and performance.

Create applications that are accessible, discoverable by search engines, and secure.

Deliver applications to all major browsers on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Extend Silverlight experiences to the desktop and mobile devices using the same tools and technologies.

The comprehensive Silverlight solution includes familiar market leading tools, servers and frameworks.

With Silverlight, you can grow your business, your productivity, and your profitability.

Call on millions of existing developers and thousands of businesses already familiar with .NET development to help create and deploy Silverlight applications.

Create rich web based applications that naturally integrate with your existing back-end systems. Easily enhance existing Websites and SharePoint sites by incrementally adding Silverlight components.

Rapidly cross-train web developers already familiar with one of the many languages supported by Silverlight.

Reduce time to market and improve team productivity through the advanced Designer Developer workflow between Expression Studio and Visual Studio.

Our goal is to unlock your potential to make your experiences as rich, compelling and connected as they can be. 
And we want to help you to do this in a way that improves customer satisfaction, unlocks business value, and delivers the results you need.

With all this, you will be able to do things faster, take on more challenges, and apply your creativity to more projects.

Although you don’t need anything more than a text editor and a Web server to create and deliver Silverlight experiences, you can deliver compelling, powerful and accelerated experiences by tapping into Microsoft’s complete solution – you can create more efficiently with Expression and Visual Studio, you can extend your experiences to wherever your customers are with technologies like the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and you can serve them reliably and cost-effectively with Windows Server 2008.

You can pick as much or as little as you need to get the job done. And whether you’re a two-person shop or a Fortune 500 corporation, there’s a solution that’s right for you.

Your creativity and your strategy are what it really takes to deliver a great experience – we take care of the rest.

Our mature, industrial-strength platform helps you design experiences easily with Expression Studio, build them quickly with Visual Studio, and deliver them reliably with Windows Server 2008.