One of the items being announced today by Microsoft at MIX is the SilverLight Analytics Framework. The Silverlight Analytics Framework will let designers and developers visually build analytics into their Silverlight applications using Microsoft’s Expression Blend.
Now, most readers of my blog already know that Developers can already inject Runtime Intelligence analytics into Silverlight (and any other managed code) using Dotfuscator inside Visual Studio. I am excited about this new framework because it offers an entirely new way to configure runtime intelligence (using Expression Blend) and that means a whole new community of users also have access to analytics for the very first time. This is also being echoed by Michael Scherotter, principal architect evangelist at Microsoft Corp. and architect of the analytics framework. He writes that we have “successfully used the Silverlight Analytics Framework to open its application instrumentation to a new audience of designers.”
Runtime Intelligence offers the following advantages over traditional Web analytics services:
· The analytics endpoint (and the resulting data) can be self-hosted and managed by the application provider (you don’t have to send your data to a third party – but that option is also available too).
· While the resulting Web analytics maps to the Silverlight Analytics Framework data model, the underlying SOAP schema is shared with Dotfuscator’s instrumentation.
The common schema allows Dotfuscator to provide a complimentary instrumentation mechanism for any .NET Framework component. THIS means that
· Middle and back-office application tiers can be instrumented providing a deeper view across distributed application workflows.
· Older or alternative applications using WPF or some other non-Silverlight form factors can be benchmarked against the newer Silverlight applications to track both user behaviors and application usage.
The world of application analytics is about to take a big step forward. In fact I believe that one day in the not too distant future application analytics will be as common as web analytics is today and the distinction will eventually disappear.
What decisions could you make to better serve your customers, to reduce your costs, and improve your products if you had ready access to usage data streamed to you from the wild?
Tell me what you would do - I would love to hear from you.
Tags: Analytics, application analytics, Dotfuscator, Runtime Intelligence, Silverlight, Silverlight Analytics