Understand the users, to open newer avenues and become a driving force.

User feedback plays an important role in product planning, prioritizing, and decision-making. Design for total customer experience, it’s no more about what you see is what you get, but it’s about the way you use is what you get, everything the customer sees, hears, and touches should be designed by specialists, right from textures to color palettes to iconography, and everything from look and feel to ease of use should reflect in the experience that the customers expect.

User-centered design is a process in which the demands, wants, and limitations of the end user of the product are given prime attention at each stage of the design process. Users are an integral part of the product design and development. The user-centered approach is a multi-stage problem solving process…… Read More http://www.siliconindia.com/guestcontributor/guestarticle/173__1/UserCentered_Software_Engineering_UCSE_Anil_Pagar.html#allmaincomment

Silverlight-3 in RIA ENVIRONMENT

I would like to highlight enhanced features of Silverlight 3 which are related to marrying Silverlight with BI apps.

Silverlight 3 introduces more business focused controls, more data and business logic connectivity. Using local storage resources and Silverlight's support to detect network availability, the out of browser applications can also still run offline disconnected from the network. We can consider a BI dashboard application which can run as a desktop application as well as it can run into the browser also. One more feature which adds to the factor for silverlight to be a candidate for BI apps is LocalConnection APIs. The LocalConnection API enables the scenarios for Silverlight applications to communicate with each other through an asynchronous messaging system. This is helpful in dashboards as well as when you have islands of Silverlight functionality mixed with standard HTML content as well.

In conjunction with the release of .NET RIA services, it will become easier to develop BI applications with Silverlight 3.

There are so many other features which are the corrective measures on top of previous release of silverlight 2.0 which makes silverlight 3.0 more powerful than its descendents. You can consider media enhancement, addition of many useful controls and enhanced web service support as the factors that can make silverlight a leading technology in the market for developing RIA applications.

RIAs -Helping to bridge gap between different Technologies.

RIA technologies are able to do so much, it’s become apparent that the mouse and keyboard are simply too limiting as input devices. RIA’s have certainly started making a noise and there is definite demand for them. Plug-ins like Flash, Silverlight have bridge the gap between the power of desktop apps and Web apps. The foundation, these plug-in technologies are based on has made them even more attractive beyond just be able to offer rich UI. Today, RIA’s are very well placed to take any battle against traditional desktop apps. Having said that, RIA’s have taken substantial time to come of age where they can compete with desktop apps.