So, we have kind of this inside joke on our team regarding Silverlight after I suggested to a few of the guys that I was going to rewrite the reporting services front end using Silverlight technology. Since then, I have often referred to Silverlight as the solution to any technical problem and offer solutions based purely on the technology. That is because I didn’t really know what it was or how cool it really is or could be. Especially in the context of BI and data visualizations.
I want to share two resources I recently came across while muddling across the interweb.
This site, developed by the folks in Microsoft Europe shows some of the capabilities of Silverlight and BI by applying the technology to a performance map using NHL data.
Second, Visifire is a set of open source data visualization ‘widgets’ from Webyog. Check out the gallery for some pretty sharp looking charts/graphs. They also have a cool chart designer in beta on their website to monkey around with.
Not really ‘the promised land’ yet but both show tremendous promise in the possible future presentation enhancements we could see in PerformancePoint and the other MS products.
