Follow on Twitter
Post to Twitter
Do you wish to use your iPhone to access Silverlight enabled web sites? Silverlight is growing in popularity. Check out the Silverlight showcase.
While currently iPhone doesn't support Silverlight natively, you will soon be able to view Silverlight powered cool web sites via Citrix Receiver for iPhone. Here is a quick preview of what is to come.
Did I forget iPhone doesn't support Flash? Here is an iPhone friendly version. I will blog about Flash on iPhone soon.
A business intelligence application is demonstrated above. You can find the demo application here.
Some Silverlight applications will work better on iPhone than others. But at least you have an option to use them now. Citrix also enabled opportunities to optimize Silverlight enabled web sites for iPhone. More on that later.
If you know any Silverlight enabled web application/sites that may be useful when accessed from iPhone, could you let me know by posting comments?
Please check out our iPhone project community site for more details.
Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
Check out my other blogs
NetScaler's Application Firewall offers great protection for Web Applications via a positive security model that lets the user decide what is allowed to reach their web server. Web site vulnerability and compliance requirements can be met by deploying this integrated firewall.
But the concept of the web is changing. Expanding beyond the traditional web pages, many sites now include programmable interfaces accessible via XML based APIs. While web sites are mainly for consumers, the programmable APIs are used by business partners and customers to automate and integrate systems. The APIs are also getting used by emerging Web 2.0 enabled Rich Internet Applications (such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight) that get deployed inside a consumer's browser. Once deployed, these RIAs will make active and passive calls to the exposed APIs of a web site. Often exchanging information in the background using an XML based protocol like REST or Web Services.
As the Web and programmatic APIs continue to become more of an integrated offering, it is important to provide security for the APIs as well as for the Web site. NetScaler 9.0 introduces a major new module inside the Application Firewall centered on XML Security. With these new capabilities, users will be able to simultaneously secure HTML based web sites as well as XML based REST and Web Services APIs.
Useful Links
Wow, I landed here in Houston and got on a cab towards the convention center - I open my laptop and I get a new feed alert, " Silverlight Web Interface Sneak Peek", from Jason's bog.
I'm thinking: "Damn Jason did it again... this kid is on fire!"
He just posted a video preview of his next project, running Web Interface with a Silverlight front-end.
He used the new APIs on WI 4.5 along with AJAX, and Citrix XenApp 4.5.
Check this out:
Keep a close look on JasonConger.com
cheers,
Gus Pinto
Microsoft MVP - Virtualization
Follow Me
Like most techie geeks, our developers like to play with the latest technology and explore what's possible. Sometimes they even get the chance to do it as part of their job...
Folks who have seen Thomas Koetzing's peek at the upcoming version of the XenApp Web Interface component will be aware that we've made some fairly major changes to the look and feel. Certainly this is the most significant design uplift since WI (originally known as NFuse) was first released in 1999. As you can imagine we're really excited by this, and we hope you'll not only like the new sleek look, but find the usability improvements we've made genuinely useful. It's been in the works for a good long time (getting on for 2 years).
However that isn't what I wanted to highlight just yet (I'm hoping to get the people who were deeply involved in doing the usability work and defining and refining the design to talk about it). Instead I'd like to show you something else we prototyped late last year, as part of some work to explore new user interface concepts and technologies. If you follow developments in the web development world at all, you will have heard about Silverlight, the new cross platform browser-base rich internet application framework Microsoft is creating. Derek Thorslund linked to the blog announcement this week from the Microsoft team busy working on Silverlight 2.0.
From our perspective, this is pretty neat stuff. Citrix is already a very heavy user of Microsoft technologies, and our UI and Visual design teams have been eagerly following what Microsoft has been doing in building a strong design/code separation into WPF and now Silverlight. For them, the ability to easily and safely update our product UIs without disrupting the code (oh I don't know, because someone wanted to change the look and names of a few products let's say...) - THAT would be the holy grail for them.
But WPF and Silverlight also offer a great chance to start being more expressive and trying out fresh approaches to UI tasks. As it happens, WI is the most commonly used interface for people to get access to Citrix delivered apps, so it is a natural one to focus on. So we let a couple of developers loose with some simple instructions: learn about Silverlight and come up with something that looks cool. Well, they didn't give us cool: they gave us bling - lots of bling! Have a look...
If you like that, have a look at this short video clip to get a better sense for what else it can do. (You'll need the Techsmith codec.) By the way, something cool that you can't tell from just looking is that it's powered by a new set of web service interfaces we're prototyping, designed to allow custom UIs to be built by all sorts of people (including us). Actually, they aren't totally new; the first generation shipped inside the Web Interface integration for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server - give that a try if you're using SharePoint, it works with the Windows SharePoint Services component of Windows Server 2003 as well.
Interestingly, our techie guys, along with a lot of other early adopter developers, gave Microsoft some pretty detailed feedback on what was good and what was missing from the early alpha. With the 1.1 alpha lots of standard UI controls were missing, leaving fairly low-level drawing primitives as the main tool to use, which ironically forced us to be more creative and come up with something that looks really new. However it's great to see Microsoft is addressing the many gaps in a very major way! (See Scott Guthrie's post for a lot more detail on what is now going to be the 2.0 version.)
Now, is this really a good user interface? I don't know - it was a learning exercise, and a nice way to test whether our service interfaces are good ones. But will we really ever do a Silverlight front-end to XenApp though? Now that's a very good question....
Would you like us to? 
Cheers,
AndrewI
Scott Guthrie, a VP at Microsoft, recently blogged about a new release of Silverlight that will soon be ready for beta trial. Silverlight 1 introduced a new browser-based video player supporting a JavaScript/AJAX programming model. Silverlight 2 focuses on enabling the development of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). An important point about RIAs is that they aren't just for the Internet. Silverlight 2 will enable "rich desktop Windows applications" for the enterprise, so it is of great interest to all of us involved with the Citrix Multimedia Virtualization Initiative. Although not offering the full 3D graphics capabilities of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), Silverlight is a strong subset of WPF that supports "2.5D" graphics effects including transparency. The UI framework provides support for animation, layout management, controls, data binding, and more.
Visual Studio 2008 will support Silverlight 2, as it does WPF, making it very easy for ISVs and other application developers -- even non-professionals -- to create rich client applications in their choice of programming language (C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, etc.).
The beta release is just 4.3MB and installs in less than 10 seconds. Unlike WPF, Silverlight 2 does not require the .NET framework to be installed on the client. Silverlight applications run within a browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari) but can be migrated to standalone desktop applications using WPF and the .NET framework.
No doubt Silverlight 2 will be a big topic at Microsoft's upcoming sold-out MIX08 conference in Las Vegas!
Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization
Our project Apollo technology for remoting Vista Aero and any multimedia application that can run on Vista just keeps getting better. This video gives you a sneak peek at the latest version of Apollo, demonstrated by Juan Rivera (Citrix Development Manager) in the Tech Lab at Citrix Summit 2008 in Orlando.