I just got an IM from my friend Lutz Roeder (of .NET Reflector fame) who has done a few demos for Microsoft's Silverlight (don't bother with the Silverlight video, it is pointless and brain-numbing).
Silverlight is essentially their long overdue competition for Flash, and technology-wise they may have gotten it right. Anyone familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (it was code named Avalon) probably knows that it has some major drawbacks, especially size and performance. Silverlight, on the other hand, is multi-browser, multi-platform (Windows and Mac at least, maybe nothing else yet) and only a 2 meg download, which is pretty impressive under the circumstances.
So, what about the code? It is a combination of XAML (probably a subset of the WPF XAML) and .NET backing code, in Lutz's case C#, plus some Javascript for seamless browser integration no doubt. XAML can be a bit tricky but that's what Sparkle is for... oops I guess I mean Microsoft Expression Blend. Let your design professional work their magic, spit out the XAML which your coders can then wire up to actual business logic. On that team they had the UI designers checking in the XAML to the source tree and working in an integrated way with the full development team, it was really nice and hopefully an early taste of the workflow of the future.
From what I've heard from Flash artists about what it takes to make that work, I have no interest whatsoever in working on that platform. Silverlight has potential, but getting a large community to shed what has become a natural distrust of Microsoft to install the platform such that the numbers get even competitive against Flash will be hard. The download was fast and painless, though, so there's hope.
Will I adopt it for my current project? Not any time soon, but if it catches on and gets a good install base it is possible. More likely I'll try it out with my next big side project and see how it goes. Looks like Sparkle has a demo version available so I could reasonably do that, but if I liked it I guess I'd be signing up for hundreds of dollars of software. Hm...
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