Interview with Ra Wilson of National Rail Enquiries

Ra Wilson, who works for National Rail Enquiries, was a member of the team that developed the proof of concept I posted about recently.  Ra, in addition to being a domain expert, rolled his sleeves up and got his hands dirty with some Silverlight development.  I thought it’d be interesting to hear his thoughts about the PoC and developing in Silverlight and Ra generously agreed that I could post an interview with him.

Ra, could you tell us a little about National Rail Enquiries and what your role is there?
National Rail Enquiries is the official source of rail information for Great Britain. We have a phone line and a website. The website takes care of over 80% of our customer contacts. Our main pieces are journey planning, live departure boards (real time information), and train station information.  I’m the Web Development Manager here. I spend about 50% of my time doing due diligence on technical solutions proposed by our suppliers and the 50% writing code and managing contract developers.

What’s your web development experience?
I have about 8 years experience in web. I started off designing user interfaces for mobile and desktop browsers, manipulating images and writing WML, XML, HTML and CSS. Pretty early on I learnt JavaScript so I could create richer user experiences and I also have some experience of classic ASP (VBScript). I used to think of myself as a web designer but now I mostly leave that to guys with better hair cuts than me.

We used Silverlight during the PoC to create a rich user experience.  Some people use Flash – have you any experience of using Flash?
I had done a little bit of Flash work about 5 years ago. I found actionscript frustrating; the almost JavaScript syntax confused me, and having all the code scattered throughout the move makes it hard to pick up someone else’s work. I believe the tools are better now though.

You wrote some of the Silverlight code in the PoC.  How did that work out?
The 3 week PoC with DPE [Developer and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft] was the first time I’d worked in a C# and Silverlight environment. I was struck by how easy it was for designer and developer to work together, even on the same file at the same time! Obviously both designer and developer are still required to have their brains switched on and being able to converse is essential, but I didn’t hear any of the usual “you’ve made my design look like 1990 clipart” or “but you can do it in Photoshop…” banter that can often cause team tension and unrealistic expectations from clients.

How did you find learning Silverlight?
I found the XAML pretty easy to pick up. It feels like HTML on steroids without the mood swings. If HTML was this easy to create the same experience cross browser I could get a LOT more done.

What about the programming aspect of it?
The C# was quite a steep learning curve but the intellisense helped a great deal. It’s very exciting to have such a powerful language exposed though Silverlight making it cross platform cross browser. I’m very tempted to lock myself away in a dark room for a couple of weeks and really get a handle on C#.

Now that the PoC is complete, what are your reflections?
The PoC was certainly an inspiring time for me. Silverlight looks like a great product to create rich web applications in, maybe even whole sites! Although I think search engines will need to up their game with the way they trawl and weigh this type of content before I can give up writing JavaScript, HTML and CSS hacks.