By Alexey Gavrilov on April 16, 2008

Silverlight 2

I’ve been a out of this little project for a while, busy with things at Loudtalks and Metalink. I even haven’t had a chance to check out Silverlight 2.

Few people asked for it and I was about to go all the way through installing VS2008 but today I received a Silverlight 2 bubblemark port, implemented by Kevin Yang. On my machine it gets ~280 fps, which is 40% increase over 1.1. You can try it yourself here.

Bubblemark validity (correctly) questioned

I’m glad to see that more cross-RIA benchmarks appear these days.

Sean Christmann made the one, which is geared towards measuring complex UI performance. You can check it out here along with an explanation on why bubblemark is not particularly relevant for the task.

For me the value of bubblemark is actually more in education, than in measuring. You can take it and see, how things could be implemented in different platforms. Consider it a rich “hello world” for RIA, which shows the basics — text, graphics, animation, and interaction with the app from a webpage.

Some stats

Finally, I checked out website stats and here are some interesting numbers:

1. The site was visited 105,000 times by 81,000 visitors
2. Most users are from US and China
3. The most requested demo is Silverlight 1.0 closely followed by Silverlight 1.1
4. Microsoft was the most active “corporate user” of the site with over 2000 visits originating there

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