Will it be possible to use any asp.net and silverlight controls in Intraweb XII?

Question

I am researching a lot on intraweb, I read that in Intraweb XII (when will this be released?) it will be possible to have:

1) "silverlight enabled controls" (mentioned here, this is the old IW XI roadmap anyway silverlight task has been moved to XII now)

2) "IntraWeb XII [...] will contain the integration with CrossTalk and ASP.NET" (mentioned here, check for Intraweb XII paragraph).

Now I don't understand what this mean in detail.

I think IW is very cool, but it lacks a good choice of components, there is only one vendor (TMS) that makes good components, but of course one can wonder "why to be limited to one vendor when I can use more components from more vendors"?

So does anyone (ideally from IW team, or that really knows the inner workings of IW XII, I mean the details of the roadmap, since XII is not being developed yet) know what the bold sentences above mean?

Will this mean I can use inside IW 3rd party components from any ASP.NET and Silverlight vendor like Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, and many, many, more?

Answer 1

I'll give it a shot.

Silverlight enabled controls means that you can embed Silverlight controls into Intraweb pages. Technically, this was done back in v9, but not really completed. I am using 10 and have rolled my own control for embedding SL into some of my pages. The controls communicate with the page through JS. Will it be able to host 3rd party SL controls? Yes and no. Yes, 3rd party vendors can make SL controls that you can use in IW. No, not the ones you mention, because they are not just SL, they are also ASP.NET as well. That is, they use the ASP.NET infrastructure to do AJAX and communicate with the page and server. IW will not handle that communication.

Crosstalk is a library that will make it possible to access .net assemblies. There is an emphasis that these will not be visual libraries, but just non-visual ones.

All of this said, new support for jQuery should provide lots of new controls from 3rd party vendors. Clean jQuery code is not tied to ASP.Net and should work well inside an IW app.