Microsoft is announcing a Silverlight Analytics Framework at its MIX10 conference next week that goes beyond Web analytics to enable developers to use instrumentation to track usage patterns for Silverlight applications running in or out of the browser. The free, open source framework will be made available on Monday on CodePlex.

The release of Silverlight 4, made available in beta in November at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, is also anticipated during the MIX conference.

The new Analytics Framework for Microsoft's RIA technology enables Web developers and designers to instrument their applications visually using behaviors in Microsoft's Expression Blend design tool without writing code. Designers can track how people are consuming and interacting with Silverlight applications. The framework also supports A/B tests -- alternate versions of the same page-- and Microsoft's SketchFlow tool, which is used to prototype applications.

Web analytics are commonly implemented using JavaScript tags on HTML pages with the collected data sent to third-party analytics vendors. Tracking events is more complicated for media-oriented applications and not possible for out of browser or offline Silverlight scenarios, which are supported in the latest release of the technology, Silverlight 3.

The Silverlight Analytics Framework is designed to enable Web analytics solution providers such as Google Analytics and Webtrends to write one module to collect event data in all of the different Silverlight application scenarios, online or off.

NBC Olympics used multiple analytic services recently to track the Silverlight application and media player it used to provide NBC.com coverage of the Vancouver Winter Games. "The requirements from their advertisers and business users required them to have six different analytics vendors hooked into their application to measure audio, video and quality of experience."

The source code for the media player, which supports IIS Smooth Streaming and DVR controls, was released in the Silverlight Media Framework in December on CodePlex. It currently has a limited license--the source code is under review for Ms-PL.

Microsoft is partnering with several analytics and controls vendors to enable analytics providers for the framework. Partners will be announced at the launch.

PreEmptive Solutions is among the launch partners, providing support for the Silverlight Analytics Framework data model inside of Expression Blend with the community edition of its Runtime Intelligence, a post compile injection technology for application performance and usage monitoring, which ships in the Dotfuscator Software Services in Visual Studio 2010.

Next generation app development is going to include a lot more feedback, particularly in Agile scenarios, said Torok, who noted that bigger companies like Microsoft already track information on usage patterns and performance.

The Silverlight Analytics Framework supports SL3, Expression Blend 3 and Visual Studio 2008. Future plans, namely framework support for Silverlight 4 and the Windows Phone 7 Series platform, and licensing information will be discussed during the MIX session, according to Scherotter. The framework is slated for release March 15 on CodePlex.

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