Silverlight v2.0 is getting closer and closer to RTM but I have yet to hear any stats as to how many browsers are running Silverlight. If I ask Adobe (by googling "Flash install base") they're only too happy to tell me that 97.7% of browsers are running Flash player 9 or better.
Not that I believe everything I read, but where are these statistics from Microsoft or some other vendor about Silverlight? I'm going to be making a technology choice soon and a little bit of empirical evidence would be an asset at this point...
All you Silverlight developers out there, show me your stats!
Quick Answer: www.riastats.com
This site compares the different RIA plugins using graphical charts and graphs.
It gets its data from small snippets of javascripts running on sites accross the web (approx 400,000 last time I looked)
At the time of this post, Silverlight 2 was sitting at close to 11%.
I would not take this as the end-all, be-all in RIA stats, but it's the best site I've found so far.
If you are developing something for a general audience, I would highly recommend against Silverlight as you immediately cut out Linux users.
I went to watch videos for the Olympics (and I run exclusively Linux), and I couldn't watch the video on their site because they were in Silverlight. On top of that, they actively removed all videos from YouTube, so I had no alternative but to try and scrounge up a Windows boot. This only served to give me a very negative opinion of NBC, and consider them quite amateurish to pick such a restricting technology for something that should be available for everyone.
While Flash has it's problems, it works fine in Linux, so I would say (at this point), it is a much superior technology choice.
If you KNOW your audience is entirely on Windows (maybe Mac).... then you can consider Silverlight with knowing you won't be cutting out part of your audience.
if you're that concerned about locking out potential users, you should be building a low-bandwidth HTML only version of your site anyways...regardless of whether you use Flash or Silverlight.
I struggled with this for a while. Ultimately, I chose to develop my site using Silverlight for the major components. I did a good bit of research, and I reached the following bottom-line conclusion:
If Silverlight fails, it will not
be for lack of installed base. There
are simply too many levers for MS to
pull (windows update, embedding it in
IE8, or even paying highly trafficed
sites to use it.
I will add this from Alexa - microsoft.com has pretty impressive daily reach and it uses SL on the main page. I would also not be surprised at all if Outlook Web Access is moved to Silverlight - thereby turning every single office outlook user who wants to access email from home/other into a roaming SL installer.
Alexa Link comparing microsoft.com/ebay.com/amazon.com
I will add this from ScottGu's blog entry:
In addition to powering the Olympics
experience in the US, Silverlight was
also used in France (by FranceTV), the
Netherlands (by NOS), Russia (by
Sportbox.ru) and Italy (by RAI). In
addition to video quality, a big
reason behind these broadcasters
decision to use Silverlight was the
TCO and streaming cost difference
Silverlight provided. In the August
2008 edition of Web Designer Magazine
(a Dutch publication) a NOS
representative reported that they were
able to serve 100,000 concurrent users
using Silverlight and 40 Windows Media
Servers, whereas it would have
required 270 servers if they had used
Flash Media Servers.
Over the last month we've seen several
major new deployments of Silverlight
for media scenarios. For example: CBS
College Sports is now using
Silverlight to stream NCAA events from
its 170 partner colleges and
university. Blockbuster is replacing
Flash with Silverlight for its
MovieLink application. And Netflix two
weeks ago rolled out its new Instant
Watch service using Silverlight.
At the 2009 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Scott Guthrie said that Silverlight was installed on "45% of the world's Internet-connected devices"
http://www.betanews.com/article/PDC-2009-Live-from-the-Day-2-keynote/1258561992 (quote taken from "9:28am PT") entry
This was the weekly poll over on CP a few weeks back. Out of the 1463 developers responding, aprox. 62% had Silverlight installed on at least one system.
So... if you're making a site targeted at Windows developers... and don't mind locking out a third of your potential market...
I haven't been able to get stats. I'd assume they might release some at PDC in late October. If you're building a site which needs to target a non-developer audience who won't want to install another plugin, you might want to wait for Silverlight.
I have done a good amount of testing with Moonlight on Linux, and it works well for sites which use either use Silverlight 1.0 functionality (pretty much 100% supported) or which happen to use the Silverlight 2.0 bits which Moonlight currently supports. The caveat is that some websites explicitly check the user agent and won't offer content if you're not on a "supported" platform. That's poor website coding, not a fault of the Silverlight plugin.
During the keynote # ReMIX UK when ScottGu gave the figure of 1.5 million installs/day I was sat next to Andrew Shorten, one of the Adobe platform evangelists (and also a good chum). He was telling me Adobe have independant evidence of an AVERAGE of 12 million installs a day, with over 40 million downloads.
It would appear 1.5 million is a tiny amount of what it could be.
Well 6 million watched the Olympics on NBC, which used a silverlight player. So at least 6 million. I've never seen exact stats, but you can be pretty certain that it is pretty small still.
Also, there is an implementation of silverlight for linux called moonlight.
I think an interesting stat comes from this site itself. Have a look at how many silverlight questions there are! And how many responses - it's not the most active topic!
I think you'll see a dramatic increase in the Silverlight install base after Silverlight 2.0 officially comes out. Right now it's still in beta. Silverlight 1.0 is out and runs quite well from what I've seen in Moonlight on Linux, but it's much harder to create full-scale applications for than version 2.0. According to Microsoft, Moonlight will be "100% compatible" at release time. See Scott Guthrie's blog (note: 2.0 was called 1.1 at the time).
Nick R, as for the fact that there isn't much Silverlight activity on these forums, I think the biggest reason for that is the very active community on the silverlight.net forums.
Scott Guthrie said (at Remix UK Sept 18 2008) that Silverlight is currently downloaded 1.5 million times per day. Over 115 million downloads since the version 1 release.
The Version 1 installed base will automatically update to version 2 when it is out of beta.
Wow! Scott said the same thing at Mix in February 08 about run rate - 1.5m. So it seems that a daily run rate of 1.5m per day for 6 months would add 270m installs to the installed base. So their numbers are not exactly clear in their meaning.
If one assumes the 115m installed base is correct, then it implies a run rate around 700k per day in the six months since SL2. Of course, many users are upgrading versions B1 to B2 as an example.
Either way, it is gaining some steady installs. It would be nice to see the run rate improve. By 2nd quarter of next year, it should be dramatically higher due to v2 shipment, application/web site adoption, pre-installation on various computers (like HP) and any unannounced distribution mechanisms.
While in general I support the idea of developing a site using silverlight and feel that that, depending on your audience, you should not have too much trouble getting users to download the plug in I would caution you against assuming that Microsoft will release the plugin built into IE or as a part of windows update.
I have had two separate Microsoft Technology Evangelists tell me that the company is reluctant to do that due to Anti-Trust reasons.
This was over a year ago and their strategy has probably evolved since then, but it enough to make me not count on that as an option for greater market penetration.
Don't forget that the Silverlight 2 install base will never include PPC Mac users. It doesn't look like the Moonlight people are targetting them at all, despite the heroic effort to add PIC streaming for Silverlight 1.0 users for the Obama inauguration.
The larger question is how many users will your site lose if implemented in Silverlight. And, it very much depends on your audience.
If you're running a site about the joys of Linux kernel hacking or the virtues of Internet security, you'll probably lose a significant chunk of your audience. If you're running a more mainstream site, my experience is that, sadly, people will download anything they're told to most of the time. That's why spyware and malware work. And, as the NBC/Olympics deal shows, Microsoft will aggressively push its partners to use Silverlight until it's fairly ubiquitous.
I won't be using Silverlight until it's more mature because I do cater to a fair number of Linux users, but I might for a less technically-oriented site.
Related
Broad, sweeping question here...
Assume you have built an enterprise level framework with some rich client in the .Net (Microsoft) sphere, with a WCF back end. Now, imagine that that enterprise framework's UI technology is being deprecated in favour of UWP.
The choices for a front end replacement basically are: UWP, Web (HTML), or some other rich client technology.
How would you go about the decision making process?
I personally lean toward a rich client where the user base is a captive user base. I mean, where the users' IT department is happy to install the necessary runtime environment on the machines, etc. This is usually not a problem with Microsoft technologies, and this won't be a problem in about 10 years when organizations roll out Windows 10.
But, people are telling me these days that web has come a long way. People are telling me that JavaScript frameworks are becoming very sophisticated, and that low level JavaScript for basic data binding and the like is mostly unnecessary.
I have really been turned off by web solutions like ASP in the past, but I do understand that technology has moved forward, and I do understand that Microsoft have been working on ASP.Net v Next which might actually be good?
The question is not so much what would you opt for? But, what factors would you take in to account to decide which platform to go for?
Opnion based answer here...
In a decision to adopt a particular tech for any project lies in many factors. I can cite two majors for your particular scenario.
1 - Client adoption. It's easy for the customers to use/install it? They need to pay some sort of license? Can it run in all platforms/devices the customer already own?
2 - Market adoption. It's easy for you co-workers to adopt it? It's hard to find/hire experienced/hardened developers? We need to pay some kind of license? Can I trust it ill be a long lived technology?
The answer to your question can be HTML.
Not only it is already got a lot of momentum in market, it ill take years to change it even if today someone (big like MS or Google) put some new (better) stuff on the table.
Also if someone on MS marketing dep say next week Universal Windows Platform or WinRT must die it ill die (like Silverlight). So Im not adopting some new technology just because some big player told me to do it.
Yes web has come a long way indeed. You can do a lot of amazing things just with JS+HTML+CSS those days. Also the right usage/architecture of it ill allow you to put your app running in PCs, Tablets and Mobiles (at a minimum cost to port between devices) and capable in running in anything can access internet.
I suggest you to catch up and learn a lot about webservices, Json, JS libraries like JQuery, Sammy and some nice stuff like Knockout, SPA, Angular, Node, etc.
Edit, answer to comments
To not start a chatty comment I'll respond here. Yes your questions and comments brings interesting questions. To let it readable for posterity both of us can edit answer and question to organize it.
Silverlight. How not love it? In special after strugling with flash. It's a shame MS pulled the plug (die in hell MS CEOs). When MS let it to die I was planning a big web app SL was my first choice. Why I changed my mind? Well 2 years to develop that app and at the end how much browser ill get along supporting it? The SL community is great, the tool is great but browsers can just say, Hey tomorrow there's no guarantee it keep working.
.Net and MS platforms. I'm a .Net developer. I adopted it since beta, first to work with winforms (in a previous life I was a proud Delphi developer). After a while started to work with web. I also worked in classical ASP (bad times) and loved .Net ASP from start.
You can run .Net apps in almost any PC in the planet today. Not exactly true for all mobiles/gadgets. For browsers pure HTML+JS+CSS ill to better because it's lightweight (done right). Also we can move a lot of thing to client side and just let it hit the server only when necessary. .Net apps can do that, sure, but ill never be light as a tailored HTML+JS+CSS.
In fact I believe you can do anything with .Net and you can do amazing things if you got a few good developers in your team. But depending on the project it ill do better (and cheaper) in HTML or PHP or Ruby or Java, etc.
In fact at a previous shop, with both PHP and .Net teams we found (after 1 year study, metrics, lots of projects) small projects are better done in PHP, larger ones in .Net (if I remember a medium project can be 4k to 6k men/hours).
The point here is. You really must read a lot about HTML, CSS, JS, SPA, Angular, etc. Bringing to live a big and shinning web app is challenging today not because what we can do (we can do anything) but how we can do. DDD, MVC, MVVM. Testing framework, etc. Man Node is the future (the concept at least).
Web developing really changed in the last years and with it the clients and users expectations. Today no one ill wait for more than 2 secs for a page to load. Everybody wants usability to be at the top of the table from project scratch. You app must be responsive, etc. (not using Dilbertian management buzz words here for the sake of it. Just stating usability is that important today).
And don't forget everyone wants it to be beatifull (from a graphical designer point of view) even if it's a dull B2B supposed to be used only by cave mens.
Even if you stick to a classical .Net app learn about the (many) options, that can bring a new wider perspective.
I have decided to answer this question here because we've had a lot more time to investigate and look at different options. The original question turned out to be a bit of a furphy. Pure UWP and Web are not the only options. There is also a Xamarin Forms as an option which includes UWP, Android, and iOS. As a personal preference, I am leaning toward using Xamarin Forms as a client instead of any other development platform because it supports three OSs out of the box: Windows 10, iOS, and Android.
I believe the answer to the question is: you should only develop a web app if you need to. Does your user base consist of people who will mostly prefer a browser over apps? Are your potential users likely to want to avoid downloading an app? Is your app very simple, and you want people to be able to dive in very quickly? Are you able to get away without access to things like the camera, location and push notifications? If you can answer yes to these things, then I think you should go for HTML 5/JavaScript. If however, your user base is comfortable downloading apps, and you think that your app will require a UI more sophisticated than most browser apps, I'd recommend looking at Xamarin Forms as the preferred option. We've had very good success with Xamarin Forms so far, and the UWP version of our Xamarin Forms app has turned out just as good as our first stab at a UWP app.
Note: I should give Web Assembly (http://webassembly.org/) an honorable mention here. This technology is being considered in all the big tech organisations like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. One day, it may make deployment of native apps in a browser great again.
I am interested in creating a desktop application using HTML5+webkit, and I'd like to be able to build a stand-alone executables for various target platforms like a .exe file for Windows and a .dmg image for Mac OS. I have played around with node-webkit, which seems nice except for the packaging / distribution portion. I also stumbled on TideSDK, but that project seems to be inactive. For example, the latest release I saw was a beta from November of 2012. Yet, it seems the core developers have switched to developing TideKit instead.
Does anyone here know if TideKit is intended as a replacement for TideSDK? Is TideSDK going away? etc.
Well, TIDE is now officially a dead project. I just got this email about 15 minutes ago.
TideKit.com and TideKit have been discontinued.
TideKit was software for developing apps for all platforms
simultaneously with a single base of code written in JavaScript.
The scope and complexity of the product made it difficult to
assemble the platform all at once. This stemmed from a holistic
approach to app development for all platforms. While creating a
platform for JavaScript developers, much of the core engineering is in
a variety of lower level languages that affect the speed of
development. We considered delivering parts of our platform as we
reached milestones, but this was not suitable for the start of trials.
We were widely criticized for not revealing our technical innovation
in advance of our release. In a competitive environment, revealing
advantages as you go can also mean assimilation as you go. We had
already witnessed how quickly our technical advantages could be
assimilated by competitors to our open source TideSDK product.
Therefore, we held back with a view of delaying the duplication of
features by competitors, increasing our technical barriers and working
to protect our IP and business case until we felt we were ready.
In a startup, we talk about a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). In our
case, our minimum viable product was much larger and more difficult to
achieve. In total, approximately three years of research and
development was committed with multiple developers working greater
than full time hours. A factor that extended the development was an
expansion of scope that aimed to lower friction in the app development
process.
In Feb 2014, we created a system to queue developers with
reservation system for the earliest possible access to TideKit. Our
goal was to provide an early trial when it became available. Since the
development itself was complex, we could not provide a date when
ticket holders could start the trial process – but it would be
following our betas, then moving forward as we scaled the platform.
We were clear with our language on the site concerning reservations.
As a result, we expected little confusion about what was being
purchased, our expectations of timing to market, or the terms of
purchase for a reservation ticket. Purchasers were not paying for our
product at this point, but for their position in a queue for a trial
of our new technology. We also included a refund policy to ensure the
terms of purchase for your ticket were available. The wait has been
long, but not nearly as long as other difficult engineering challenges
including Myo that pre-sold their product and were also delayed before
successfully rolling out.
Throughout the development cycle we provided updates of our status
via posts roadmap page, email to our ticket holders and communications
on our social channels. We did our best as a team to open ourselves to
questions and maintain a social presence.
At the end of May 2015, we communicated our strategy to execute a
series of focused betas that would have seen the platform revealed
publicly and incrementally. We were at a stage that parts of the
platform needed developer feedback as we rolled these out
consecutively.
In the days preparing for our first public beta, we recognized the
extent to which our brand had been poisoned by our timing to market. A
campaign of negativity that had begun several months earlier with
followers and ticket holders had taken its toll on our team, brand,
and business.
We believed the beta releases would soon bring an end to the
negative talk. On July 8 and 9 we faced further eruptions on social
media that reached the tipping point. With the discussion no longer
about the product nor its future, this was far more serious.
We failed to bring the product quickly enough for you. As a result,
we came to the serious decision to discontinue TideKit and dissolve
our company.
We wish to thank everyone involved that worked on the product and with
our team. This includes businesses, entrepreneurs and supporters of
our vision for app development.
Your TideKit Team
you are right, TideSDK is aging and pretty inactive today. And you're also right, we as a core team completely focus on TideKit now. TideKit is the future!
If you want to know the full story about why we stopped working on TideSDK and started TideKit, I recommend you to read our first Q&A. There you'll also find an answer about how we compete with node-webkit:
https://blog.tidekit.com/post/your-questions-our-answers-01
We've just reached the highest HTML5 score any app development platform ever achieved. If you want to know more about builds, like the ones you mentioned for Windows and OS X, you should read this
Desktop Builds
https://blog.tidekit.com/post/from-a-desktop-perspective-tidekit-for-tidesdk-developers
There is a new kid on the block for this sort of projects: atom-shell Based in nodejs and used to create the great Atom editor
Technical differences with node-webkit: https://github.com/atom/atom-shell/blob/master/docs/development/atom-shell-vs-node-webkit.md
Presentation at JSLA about "Native NodeJS Apps": http://vimeo.com/97881078
If you look at this blog post, they talk about how unsustainable the economical situation is
http://www.tidesdk.org/blog/2013/04/11/tidesdk-in-numbers/
and I can't find the tweet that was stating the reasons behind the transition from one project to another. But I guess that the blogpost speaks for itself.
Anyway, I'm delivering a project written in node-webkit ( because I starded on Tide but for the obvious reasons I had to switch ) and I'm using grunt for packaging and in the end is not that bad.
Electron (http://electron.atom.io/) is the new way to go.
I also had an app running on TideSDK (https://github.com/vinyll/worktimer.titanium) and I'll have to migrate it to Electron.
My company has a control panel website written in ASP.NET. We run an online service used by over 20,000 users worldwide, mostly from the US, Japan and several European countries. It is used mostly by business users.
We face many problems using ASP.NET and development times are lengthy. I played around a bit with Flex and I can see why it would cut down development times however I am afraid we would not be able to support browsers that do not have flash installed. Considering the fact that many of our customers are business users in companies that might not allow to install flash.
Your opinion and suggestions will be appreciated.
This isn't really a programming question, it is a commercial question for your product management and marketing people. Flex requires Flash as you are aware, so the answer is to find out the degree to which Flash is supported in your customer base - and the version. Start with your biggest and highest profile customer. If you can't get away with it there it is a non-starter.
I am pretty sure that your feature set will be better as well as your development time if you use Flash/Flex for your control panel, so from that standpoint I would strongly advocate it. You may also be able to influence your customers' environments if you are adding highly valuable features, so the objection may disappear if the value is high enough.
However the value has to be quite high for people to contemplate such a change to their working environment. This is especially true in environments who feel that Flash is a risk and have removed it because they tend to be paranoid about software on the desktop. Shorter development times is not a good argument for anyone on the commercial side of the house when faced with such trade-offs, so beware of forwarding that in a customer context as a compelling argument - it isn't.
HTH and good luck - I hope you manage to switch over, you will have a huge amount of flexibility and sizzle added to your apps.
In your current ASP control panel you should put in a small flash script to see how many users can access it, if all or most users can access it then then it shouldn't be a problem to use flex. Over all most users have flash and it shouldn't be a problem.
Currently i am working on developing one Warehouse solution from scratch, i am planning to build it in silverlight (as this solution will take around 8-10 months) and the programming will start from Feb 2010.
I need to develop this application for one organization. Certain parts needs to be accessed by public which we are planning to build in ASP .Net 3.5
Now i just wanted to start a thread here for pros and cons of using silverlight, some of them i have already analyzed
Pros :
Rich UI
Excellent user experience
Reduction of scalability concerns
New set of features like data binding, control template etc..
Speed of development (After initial learning curve..my experience says it is faster to develop it in silverlight)
Other rich set of features coming up with SL 4.0 (SL 4.0)
Cons :
Cross platform issues (moonlight is there but it may take some time)
Cross browser issues (Chrome or other browsers)
Learning curve
Any other unknown risk (As there are not many enterprise level application developed in silverlight...or may be i am not aware)
I have also got one link for Pros and cons of silverlight(here) some of the cons might not be relevant with SL 4.0
Also i am having one good link for comparison between ASP .Net Ajax with Silverlight (here)
EDIT :
I have also found Technical Article series in code project (Just Type # google "Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application" and you will get it, i am trying to analyze this series as well)
Please add some pros and cons if you find as i am trying to analyze it from all the angles. It will be of great help if you find any whitepaper on it.
The Pros and Cons have to be weighed against your own requirements.
Rich UI
Compared to what? Its not really a Pro, other tools can deliver Rich UI, where does one draw the line that allows a UI to call itself Rich? A Pro can't be a Pro if can't be measured.
Excellent User Experience
That isn't a Pro either. I wish I could buy product that delvers such a thing out of the box. The reality is it's up to you to deliver the UX. E.g. Stackoverflow delivers an excellent user experience, it doesn't use a tool like SL and it's entirely down to good design not the tool (ASP.NET-MVC+various other tools).
Reduction of Scalability Concerns
Compared to what? Early ASP.NET Forms with extensive use of callbacks then yes. However plain old HTML with Javascript frameworks can deliver this same "Pro".
Speed of Development
Well that depends on how you measure speed and how you weigh the importance of the UX. Currently SL developement isn't any better at ticking off business function points than other tech like poor old ASP.NET Forms and is probably worse. However delivering those same function points with a slick, imaginative UI may tip the balance more in WPF/SL's way. In reality SL allows you deliver more UX with some (but importantly not prohibative) extra effort.
Other Rich Features in SL4
Only a Pro if they would actually add value to your requirement.
Cross Platform
Do you really have a Cross Platform requirement? Within a warehouse business how many Linux and Mac desktops are there? That should answer your cross platform question.
Cross Browser
Is this a Con? Does the company in question allow the use of a variety of browsers? If so which? You can compare that to the browsers SL4 supports and out pops your answer but its your answer not everyones answer. Isn't cross-browser a bigger concern for the Extranet-esq part of the app?
Learning Curve
In all of these factors what are you already versed in is by far and away the most important. I'm guessing its MS tools and in particular .NET, right?
If you're not familiar with WPF already there is some learning curve but its not very steep. However you should definitely make sure you take the time to perform some training projects before you even start designing your real product. That process should help you measure how long it will really take and whether it is really feasable.
Other Known Risks
SL is still very young and it won't sit still. Frustrating "issues" will eat time.
Other questions to ponder
What UX ideas do you have that can't be delivered by a browser?
Why deliver the app via a browser hosted app at all? A WPF application not an option?
Silverlight 4
Considering your timescales if you do choose Silverlight you should target SL4.
Since you are developing solution for the warehouse, you may need consider building a web service with wcf pollDuplex (basically push data from server to the client periodically), just a note on it: it is not (yet) a very scalable and reliable (prior to SL4). Default concurrent connection is 10 (if I remember well), and you have the option to overwrite this default number, however, I haven't find a way to dynamically change this number which turns out to be a scalability issue.
One cool feature I like about SL 4 is the added support of printing, now you have the built-in ability to print the content.
Anyone bulding an Enterprise LOB with a Silverlight client should take a look at John Papa's PDC video.
However, IMHO the initial release of RIA Services was too limited. Now that the next version is buit on top of WCF Services, and the endpoints can be switched out to make them more accessible by more UI clients RIA Service is probably a very sensible investment too.
Using the GamerServices component for XNA to access Xbox/GfW Live for networking purposes requires developers and players each to have a US$100/year subscription to Microsoft's Creators Club. That's not much of an issue for Xbox360 XNA projects as you need the subscription anyway to be able to put your game on the 360.
But for PC games using XNA, requiring developers and players to put that much up each year is pretty crazy just for the access to a player's gamer card. Are there any solutions for XNA games that provide similar benefits to GamerServices? Or are developers pretty much restricted to building their own networking functionality if they don't want to subject their players (and themselves) to that $100/head hit?
Perhaps you could try Lidgren
Please note that games for windows live is now free:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/22/games-for-windows-live-now-free/
Since using the Live APIs is your only option on xbox and zune, it makes it a pretty compelling option since your only issue was the cost on windows :-) Especially considering the fact that once game studio 3.0 launches, you'll be able to sell your games on xbox live's new community games section
Edit, upon further investigation, it turns out that the games for windows live stuff is kind of half-baked. The gamerservices library doesn't seem to be included in the redistributable bits. So unless you want to break the EULA, your player would have to install gamestudio. That being said, I do still believe that it's free nonetheless, if not inconvenient.
Well, you can use sockets, obviously, and using sockets you can create a seperate, dedicated server app, which you can't do with Live (as far as I know). You could also try SteamWorks; I haven't heard of anyone trying that, however.