on May 14th, 2007Silverlight – Expectations and more
I read some wonderful articles about possibilities with Silverlight and trust me they are tremendous. The CLR integration, the browser independent mode, the seamless brilliance in video delivery and also easy to build tools will probably make silverlight a leader in its own right. I shall not blabber anymore and quote from some other articles .
 The video handling capabilities of SilverLight are impressive. During MIX, there were several demos showing multiple video streams being shown in one application, many of which were in motion and had various types of masks. The demos looked great at MIX, but what surprised me most is that they looked just as good on my 3 year old desktop at home and the applications were surprisingly easy to build. This is one area where SilverLight is definitely going to be the top dog.
The other great feature about SilverLight is the CLR integration. The in-browser CLR extension allows access to almost the entire .NET framework, from a client side app. It also uses XAML, the same presentation markup as WPF for the desktop. It’s nice because Microsoft isn’t trying to force developers into a new language. It’s also nice because it makes for a much more robust development experience than working with AJAX or even Flash.
My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight. There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers and it is up against Flash which is deeply entrenched – but the barrier to delivering a new plugin to browsers is nowhere near as high as most users will trust Microsoft as the publisher of the plugin and will install it. I also expect that Silverlight will get distribution through Windows Update and Microsoft’s own applications (hotmail?).
I’m glad we waited to write. Nik (a long-time developer) was most impressed by how small Silverlight is (4 MB) and how fast it is (it blows away native Javascript routines – without exaggeration, Ajax looks like a bicycle next to a Ferrari when compared to Silverlight).
The news today about Silverlight is significantly more thoughtful. Microsoft-hater Steve Gillmor gives it a thumbs up and says “the engineering behind this is stunning.†Robert Scoble, who’s angry at Microsoft for not giving him a free pass to the Mix event, says “Microsoft “rebooted the Web†yesterday.†The list goes on
what more could I possibly say. Yes , I did write about Silverlight before MIX, thats something I guess.
