Finally a decent explanation of Silverlight - thank you.

I agree, quite a good explanation of this Silverlight business!

I like how every mention of cross-platform means only Windows and OSX. Let’s call a spade a spade: Microsoft has little interest in supporting anything other than their own platform, and only supports OSX to avoid the Mac fanboy rhetoric that would result if OSX wasn’t supported.

I eagerly await having to use a proprietary operating system to visit culturally influenced and influencing websites, video/multimedia sharing being the current poster child, because they are implemented using increasingly closed technology.

I had my doubts about this challenger to Flash until presented in the context of streaming media. Now, I can see this is yet another good move by MSFT in the internet television landgrab, and SilverLight’s value to the xBox / MediaCenter / WindowsMobile platform shouldn’t be underestimated, even if it doesn’t sway Flash-aholics from their tool of choice. Will be interesting to see how Adobe’s streaming suite will compete with this.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next year.

Will it be as cross-platform as IE?
I do remember that IE was marketed as cross-platform when it still had a competitor: IE4 for Windows (all), Mac OS & Solaris, IE5 for Windows (all) & Mac OS, IE6 for Windows (all) and finally IE7 for Windows (XP & Vista only).
Been there, seen that.
Not for me anymore, thanks.

By the way, Nik, a mainly closed-source implementation of secrets APIs available only on 2 proprietary platforms can surely be a nice toy to play with but I would not call that a “vision for all web users”. Or am I not a web user?

Great article. As an MS developer, getting a Flash replacement could not come soon enough.

This is extremely exciting news. I have been watching Microsoft’s developments in this arena. I considered several times getting into Flash, but this makes life so much easier. Now I don’t have to learn entirely new technologies - I can stick with .NET.

Are all of the above commenters on the TechCrunch gravy train? This reads as a Miscrosoft “Advertorial” if I’ve ever seen one. Don’t spend it all in one place Michael.

I used to be a Microsoft-only developer.

As much as this sounds like a troll, I’m simply tired of hearing about their reactionary efforts to follow trends. I saw Zune’s demise from a mile away, and I’m wondering how long it’ll take for this to tank as well.

MS has created a very successful market of developers who are willing to throw money at their problems - i.e. component development/activex , turning Visual Studio into .NET (and causing all their VB coders to run to the bookstores), etc.

What happened to Vista being impenetrable to virii and whatever soup-du-jour attacks were supposed to be on the horizon? Do we just not talk about the known exploits, or do we pretend they just never issued that press release.

I’m still a Windows kid (2000, thanks very much - I don’t need to drop another 400 dollars so I can have rounded buttons and groovy graphics), but I’m only here for the same reason as most developers - I’m admittedly too far gone to bother re-investing months to move to another platform (and lose all my windows-only software licenses for the tools I use).

Once IE7 became a pretty blatant feature lift from Opera and Firefox, I’d had enough. How long until other people do as well?

Good … at last a tuf competition for the flash market has come .

It’ll be interesting to see how many sites and users end up adopting the technology. It used to be impossible to get people to download a new plugin just so they could view your site, but I guess thats how flash got started too…

I think the OSX support was a good move provided they can keep it up to date with the Windows version. To all the people complaining about Linux support… get real! Mac users already represent such a small fraction of consumer web users, how important is it that MSFT go through the trouble of developing a plugin for the 5 nerds that user Linux as their day to day OS for browsing the web?

Nice explanation finally. I doubt silverlight will ever reach the adoption rate that flash has seen. Maybe it could just drive Flash to innovate more.

Wow, something Microsoft finally seems to have gotten right and is competing in the…highly?…competitive Flash market? Seriously, it’s a good explanation and all but how does this help Microsoft compete against Google in either online advertising or search? Nothing was mentioned about either. While a seemingly solid product, it reeks of lack of direction.

It looks like Google is finally doing some good: they’ve spurred MS back into being the research-based, pioneering company it used to be before monopoly-hood.

MS will make Adobe another Sun Microsystems by today’s announcements. Just look at the possibilities by all tools combined…huge huge huge step towards staying as a leader. Mikey, next time, show some enthusiam when you are really excited..don’t be just hypocrate and let others write this special blog entry when you really feel you should write it…

I completely agree with David Mackey.

This is exiting news for all the .NET developers! Of course nobody expects them to overthrow Flash overnight but this is a very smart move by MSFT.

# 15 Agree with you 100%

How is this better than flash? For any product to gain ground, it has to have a real advantage over competitors. Is there any chance this could become the security nightmare of ActiveX?

Flash gained ground because there was no other good alternatives to present animation in a browser at the time, not the case anymore for silverlight.

With the growing popularity of and adoption of Linux in countries like India, where there will be massive growth in broadband Internet usage over the next 5-10 years, MS may be forced to port this platform in order to remain relevant in those markets. Either way, it sounds interesting.

Development of a plug-in for Opera on linux is being discussed by Microsoft. There is a silverlight demo on the main developer’s blog that includes a video of the blogger discussing this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh/

I looked at the tutorials and stuff on how to actually use it as a programmer. The Javascript+XAML stuff is falling-over-easy. I can see how half competent programmers can create really cool stuff with this, and no expensive development environment like Adobe’s software needed. Pretty good. Now with SilverLight Streaming they just removed the last barrier to entry, they’ll even host the application for you. Cool.

One downside: I installed SilverStream and it needed a reboot. Until they solve that its a non-starter for the average Joe User, unless they sneak it in with some Windows Update, which require reboots sometimes. But how many people got the Windows Update turned on? Getting wide distribution is going to be somewhat of a problem.

It’s about time someone gave a good explanation… good luck trying to figure it out on microsofts website.

First Silverlight worm/virus/spyware in 3…2…1….

It sounds interesting, but forget for a moment how cool it might be technologically. How is this an offensive move rather than a defensive one? What prompts money to change hands? Other than stifling competitors, why is Microsoft doing this?

Why isn’t Adobe’s Flex mentioned in this article nor comments? It looks like Microsoft’s Silverlight is just a copy of Flex. As a framework for Flash it gives devellopers a powerfull tool for creating Rich Internet Applications thruw the means of Actionscript and MXML (the flex markup language). It contains all the functionality of Flash in a structural way, which clears the way for rapid development. With the new Creative Suite (3) there’s also a thigter integration between the former Macromedia tools and the Adobe tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. As Adobe is also moving forward and there products are already commonly used by designers aswell as devellopers, Microsoft has to bridge a giant gap to win some market share. As the giant they are, they are probally capible of bridging the gap, though it will be a tough battle.

(I appologise for my bad English)

for .net web dev shops who don’t have flash expertise and out source it this is a winner.

All MS has to do is get large broadcasters to port their media players over to it and the rollout will explode.

They will roll it out to all windows users at some point I am guessing.

I agree with #27 but would also give a shout out for Apollo, Adobe’s new internet platform.

One of Microsoft’s big problems, as mentioned in the article is credibility with the right marketplace - something that Adobe has in spades.

I was thinking about Apollo too. This article talks of Silverlight bringing the desktop to the web as it were, whereas Apollo is about bringing the web to the desktop (or opening up the desktop to web apps). Are they basically about the same thing? As someone who plays around with some websites and would like to be able to develop web apps that work offline, what do people think is the best route to go down (ie learn something once)?

Thx

Thank god for a extremely detailed explanation of Silverlight that too on Techcrunch the irony. Now can we stop comparing this with flex, apollo etc. As far as I can see Silverlight beats the pants out of them all.

“… chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude.”

Holy! That must be the most surprising thing ever, compiled bytecode wins against a scripting language!

That’s great news! Agree with #15 totally - Google is upto something good now.

Good explanation of Silverlight, however I expect to see a Firefox extension pretty soon to block all Silverlight while viewing web pages.

Maybe it will be called, SilverBlock.

I know a dog when I see one.

Lol. This would piss off Firefox, Opera browser. Hahahaha. IT wouldn’t work on Firefox and Opera. It won’t get HTML & Javascript right.

I’ll bet the script kiddies and the botnet gurus are drooling all over themselves with this announcement-like Simon said- first Silverlight worm/virus/spyware in 3…2…1…. -This is really going to be fun. I’ll keep Silverlight off my ‘puter thanks. And I’ll bet that’s the story with business users as well. It’s been hard enough to get them to install any other plug-ins on their machines. I can’t wait to hear the backlash when they do a “security” update that opens their users to Silverlight control. But really- nothing to see here- move along.

wow, in the us you have real ms fans. you are all freak out about what? ms is copying a software again? wow, impressiv. even the name is a joke. a silverlight and a flash is pretty much the same, isn’t they?

Hi, It’s me again…

I tell you why Apollo and Silverlight will fail to reach the market.

most users don’t have high speed modem. I’m dead serious. Everyone is keeping budget small. Here’s why?

Some 70% small businesses and users don’t live rich town like redmond or silicon valley. Some state only have 56k modem (Not business DSL). People can’t afford to buy newly operating system and high speed connection. Why don’t you(Apollo developers & Silverlight) MBAs and super geniuses travel down to Datriot, New Orleans, Maine, LA, lowerclass in nj, and poor states.

1.) milk is expensive
2.) food is expensive
3.) gas is expensive
4.) rent is expensive
5.) mortage is expensive
6.) high technology on poor states can’t generate revenues.
7.) You got teens going to war with iraq
8.) college is expensive
9.) product is expensive; Product is cheap in overseas
10.) Stockmarket turmoil might hit on VC technologies.

Sorry guys, everything else in here isn’t love.

This is why Apollo and Silverlight started to failed soon. You guys need marketing research. Keeping budget too high is going to make next stockmarket crash.

it’s funny how they dont require validation for the silverlight install — are they saying they need “pirate penetration” to get some silverlight some traction??

The sad part of this movie is …

“Flash has such in routes’ if Adobe would have just made it near open source, and developed some tools to easily use it… This product wouldn’t have had a shot - now it does.

The Silverlight logo look like a pair of underpants!

@whoever is complaining about ActiveX…. Are F*ing serious? This is a Web 2.0 Blog!!!!

Microsoft first implemented the XMLHttpRequest object in Internet Explorer 5 for Windows as an ActiveX object. Engineers on the Mozilla project implemented a compatible native version for Mozilla 1.0 (and Netscape 7). Apple has done the same starting with Safari 1.2.

http://developer.apple.com/int.....tpreq.html

Jeez

@39

According to eMarketer, using the FCC as its benchmark for broadband households for 2007, Based on 288.5 million people n the U.S. ages 3-plus in 2007:

36% (103.5 million) of Americans are Not Online
15.7% (45.2 million) of Americans are Dial up users
48.3% (139.4 million) of Americans are Broadband users.

I would say that 139.4 million people is enough to kickstart a cool technology.

Very disappointing that there was no mention of supporting anything other than OS X. Microsoft’s mentality hasn’t changed. This is an exclusive move…not an inclusive one. Linux on the desktop is far from ready for the mainstream…but why not create a true cross platform solution?

Linux on the desktop is much more of a threat to Microsoft than OS X. It’s free. Once it’s ready for general adoption then MS (and Apple) will realize a huge threat. It just smells like Microsoft is making a blatant attempt to exclude users. They’re trying to launch the browser war all over again … but this time i guess it’s a plugin/platform war :).

Silverlight isn’t a Flash copy - it’s much, much better. It’s faster, allows for smoother, better looking animations, much better video quality, and is much easier to develop for, especially since a developer can write for it using their preferred method (Javascript or .NET - which means C#, VB, Python, Ruby or Jscript).

Have you become a Microsoft stooge now too?

I agree with #45

Now that the industry is headed to web service applications instead of desktop installed software, how could Microsoft try to keep Linux from going main stream? They can try to make the web proprietary only. This is the story here and I was really disappointed that this infomercial of an article didn’t even hint around about it.

They aren’t as worried about OSX because it is only available with newly purchased Mac hardware. However, every computer that now runs Windows could run Linux tomorrow at no cost if people decided to switch.

I am sure it’s a great technology and a great advance but if they leave the millions of linux users behind they will find out it’s more than just 5 nerds despite what #12 thinks.

3 things give me comfort about this story.
- Open Source will find a way to make this work
- Adobe Flex will grow faster after it’s Open
- There might be a possible Linux version thanks to the Novell/MS deal (not very likely)

I was lucky to get a demo of this a few weeks ago and like what I see.

One of the things that, working in a MSFT development shop and having a true love/hate disgust/appreciation of them and their methods, and agreeing that in general they tend to be more reactionary than creative, MSFT got right and others are only starting now to catch on (BEA, Apple, & a couple of others, but Sun, Jboss, Borland, others did not) is that MSFT made it EASY for any developer to develop. They supported them, they give a one license fee (MSDN license I would argue was one of the most strategic business decisions they ever made. All the tools a developer could possibly need for $3000). Try doing that in Delphi, or Java. Need to buy this license and that license and it all adds up. One license, every tool imaginable. Is there any wonder there are over 60M VB - .NET developers in the world and less than 6M delphi developers and rapidly declining? Remember that Borland was bigger than MSFT at one point. (those #’s were accurate a few years ago, not sure now but still).

MSFT is a massive, massive organization. This is one of their biggest problems, they aren’t exactly nimble, they are often bogged down in meetings and silos not communicating with each other what they’re doing.

One of the problems in developing in flash is the cost. It’s not a huge issue but it’s still there and Silverlight is a lighter tool with easy integration, which is easier, and developers love easier. The huge windows development pool will like this and we’ve been waiting for it. And that’s not a small thing.

The logo does kind of look like a set of futuristic Depends though…..

If even half of Silverlight features are as good as described here, and it will be cheaper than Adobe Flash, that may feed web growth for years to come.

“There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers…”

Surely MS will just push this out with Windows Update, or embed into an updated Vista SP? Or would both of those moves be seen as anti-competitive? I know that IE7 was basically pushed out as a Critical Update…

Remember Windows Media? That was supported on the Mac for a while, until they managed to get enough web sites to use it. Then they ditched the Mac version and told people to switch to Windows. (There’s a plug in that lets you play WMV in QuickTime, but it only works with DRM-free WMV.)

Remember ActiveX? That was supported on the Mac for a while, until they decided they didn’t need Mac users any more and dropped it from IE.

Then they dropped IE as well.

So while Silverlight might be supported on the Mac today, you’d be crazy to adopt it expecting it to remain supported.

Also, why don’t Microsoft put some effort into supporting existing standards rather than always trying to invent new ones? Why not have Windows ship with the ability to play MPEG-4? Why not fix the CSS in IE? How about supporting SVG vector graphics?

In fact, why didn’t Microsoft produce tools that created SVG animations scripted by JavaScript, and streamed MP4 video? Then even if they decided not to continue to support the Mac, it wouldn’t matter–and the resulting files would work on Linux too.

No, it’s pretty obvious that the only reason for Silverlight is that Microsoft wants to get people to use a proprietary standard so they can then play the “pull the rug out from under them” game again. Well, I’m not playing.

I have just a couple of points to add to the discussion about cross-platform, particularly Linux. First, Adobe’s Flex compiles into .swf files which run on the Flash Player. And the Flash Player runs on Linux, Windows, Mac, mobile, etc. That means if you invest your time learning Flex you will be able to program for all these platforms. Second, Adobe’s Apollo has been (or will be) ported over to run on Linux, Windows, Mac, etc. Again, learning Apollo will open up a whole world of platforms to you. We cannot say the same thing about Silverlight (yet, or ever?).

Interoperability? If they’d put a quarter of the engineering resources into fixing IE7 their target demographic would have been a lot happier.

Anybody have a guess how much money is wasted every year on hacking sites to work with both Internet Explorer and standards-compliant browsers? It’s gotta be in the billions.

Linux may be free, and it may be great, but it doesn’t run iTunes.

If anyone is interested, the video app shown in the screenshots above was developed by Metaliq, http://www.metaliq.com.

All of you geeks are missing the big picture!!!

Flash adoption by the general consumer has spiked since 2004 because of……… VIDEO & WIDGETS……. ON SOCIAL NETWORKS LIKE MYSPACE / YOUTUBE!

Doesn’t anyone get that? Look at the source code of silverlight and it’s ALL javascript based! You CAN’T DO JAVASCRIPT IN MYSPACE etc…

So… Flash is still king and MSFT has tried many attempts to de-thrown a leading technology with failure such as SALT vs VoiceXML etc… People will keep installing Firefox over IE because it’s better. People will stick to Flash because they can share photos, music, video in myspace, facebook, youtube etc…

So who is this technology aimed for? Geeks.

Adobe: Entrench flash with the consumer and social networks and you win this battle with Microsoft. Support startups (like me) and content producers who leverage flash in innovative ways and you kill silverlight.

No one cares if it’s going to be in ruby, vb or whatever jargon you can muster, consumers care about responsive entertainment and this PR would only spur me to move heaven and earth in Adobe’s Flash camp to ramp up Flash HDTV, Flash Light Development tools for Consumers (Think Leapfrog!) and PROVIDE A FLASH DEVELOPER TOOL FOR SMALL BUSINESS to create FLASH BUSINESS APPLICATIONS EASILY…. WHY? Because that’s where Silverlight could kill flash…

Silverlight Install Crashes Firefox 1.8 on Windows XP

Well, just downloaded the plug-in via Firefox rv:1.8.1.3 on Windows XP SP2
with plenty of power. The install crashed the browser. So much for
browser neutral. Man…check the software maker’s claims and
demos before declaring them true….

It is “complement”, not “compliment”

To those who are complaining this is a copy of Flex, remember that XAML and WPF were concepts way before Flex was on a drawing board. Flex and Adobe’s markup lanugage for Flex were derrived from XAML and WPF in its early days.

OMG, Mike… are you kidding me?

Where is your usual wit and straightforward, no BS point of view?! Silverlight is simply too little too late for MS. In no way does it even compare or compete with Flash… we’re talking about 2 very different leagues here. This offering from MS is a PR feeding frenzy… and you gotta love how they threw “Ruby” in there.. as if!

So lets stop doing two things: 1.) Let’s stop talking about Silverlight as though it’s some monumental leap forward for the internet, lmao.. and 2.) let’s stop pretending Ruby on Rails* is a real development platform. These are both technologies for high school kids to whet their pallettes on.

(you know if it wasn’t for Rails being such a Beanie Baby then Ruby would have never been brought into this disgusting onslaught of buzzwords.)

Some points to various comments above:

“It’s faster, allows for smoother, better looking animations, much better video quality, and is much easier to develop for”

Got any benchmarks? ActionScript 3 in Flash 9 compiles to bytecode and runs on a JIT. It’s fast, and the animations are definitely smooth. It’s 10x or more faster than previous versions of Flash.

“a developer can write for it using their preferred method (Javascript or .NET - which means C#, VB, Python, Ruby or Jscript).”

True. That’s an excellent feature.

“Or would both of those moves be seen as anti-competitive? I know that IE7 was basically pushed out as a Critical Update…”

Everyone wanted IE7 distributed as quickly as possible. IE6 is showing its age and web development as a whole is at a standstill until Microsoft gets off their ass and supports more standards.

“I tell you why Apollo and Silverlight will fail to reach the market… [people are poor and only have dial-up, blah, blah]”

This hasn’t stopped YouTube and other video sites from taking off. The tech community leads new technologies and things like Silverlight, Flex, and Apollo can begin gaining ground even when some old guy living in the middle of the desert or folks in the inner-city don’t get to use them right away.

Awesome article. Very easy to understand what Silverlight is.

Wow, some of the comments here are amusing….

How could some of you possibly get it so wrong about cost? There’s tons of ways to create SWF for free beyond the Adobe tool offerings, and run for free atop the universal Adobe Flash Player — go check swftools.com or osflash.org for no-cost tooling. The Flex SDK is free, and the editor and server are only optional amenities — Flex has no cost, zero, zip. Apollo’s the same.

Lots of other unsupported claims in here — benchmarks, MXML chronology, development costs, bandwidth requirements, more. When reading Nik’s article I kept looking for a disclosure page, and I suspect that the same question may be applied to many of the anonymous comments in here as well.

jd/adobe

John D- you’re right about Flex of course. I haven’t used as apollo yet. SL is a contender against flex for its capabilities of building RIA’s. Given that both have runtimes that are downloadable, SDKs for developers, local files system access, and proprietary developmental environments - these 2 will be competitors. I am not so sure about using javascript though. If Silverlight uses XML, it has to parse and render and then bound into the j/s runtime, which can take time. hmmm!

I wonder if these technologies spell the death knell for AJAX development. What does AJAX offer that Silverlight/Flex does not?

I have been a long time Flash/Flex developer (as well as C, C++, Java blah blah) and was very interested in WPF and WPF/e when they were announced - even a little excited. While I do think that Silverlight is a potential competitor for Flash/Flex, I have not seen anything to substantiate Nik’s claim that it makes them look like a toy. Can you clarify this claim Nik?

I have seen a number of benchmarks around, and from a rendering perspective the platforms are about the same. All of the Silverlight demos I have seen have not achieved anything I have not seen in Flex/Flash to date. With the Flex platform now being open-sourced, there will be a plethora of great/free development tools coming out - so the tools argument is pretty redundant.

So… what’s the big deal with Silverlight?

ps. I was initially interested in the WPF offering due to the 3D hardware rendering support until I found out (a) WPF/e doesn’t have any 3D hardware rendering support, and (b) WPF does not support pixel or vertex shaders, making it virtually useless except for a few cheap 3D gimmicks.

Oh crap, sorry Nik. Was meaning to respond to the following post by Michael Arrington, but all these techcrunch articles look the same…

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....important/

Silverlight is to .NET what Applets were to Java, it took 10 years for MS to respond. What will unfold next between Adobe and MS is what we’ve seen happen with Sun and MS, both slowly back away from proprietary interfaces, Adobe open source spec and code of everything flash, MS supports flash, engages in embrace, extend and extinguish. Flash is (technically) much weaker (feature and performance wise), Adobe doesn’t have the muscle to engage in a marketing battle, its only hope is to turn to open source, just like Sun did. Next, the battle turns MS vs. Google, the showdown continues…

“In a demonstration today showing a game of chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude.”

apple-to-oranges comparison, .NET (jscript) runs on top of a full blown dynamic compiler and a state of the art garbage collector. Javascript is interpreted!

In the past couple years Microsoft lost tremondous ground on the net. I am looking forward to see how Silverlight is going to compete.

@Denis: Applets? Heard of Windows Forms Browser Controls? I guess you haven’t. Heard of XBAPs? I guess you haven’t. Apples to Orange comparison?

Feeding the Trolls…

A lot (if not most) .NET developers work on intranet applications - and do not know Flash. Once they get their hands on a tool like this it might not immediately move toward public web applications but may find itself integrated into Intranet-deployed applications. That is probably where it will gain initial traction.

Ye damn some people getting posts mixed up. Lots of questions have popped up since the announcement on Monday and I would just like to mentioned a couple of things:

* 4MB is small, because it is a CLR, not a ‘plugin’
* Mac is larger because it is a universal binary (eg. both x86 and ppc code)
* Silverlight isn’t even out yet - so it doesn’t mean that they won’t announce linux,symbian or support for any other platform at some point later. To come out with IE,FF and Safari support from the day of announcement, and to have a running CLR and debugging environment on Mac OSX, is very damn cool - I think it is being under-appreciated.
* Silverlight is much much more than creating animations - it is a fully fledged dev environment and it has been designed that way from the outset.

No disclosure required from me, those that know me know that I am a big champion of open standards and open source and I run FreeBSD on a desktop and either BSD or Linux on all my servers - I have also contributed to these projects and tons of other open source projects - so to say that I am a cheersquad for msft is nothing more than a very very cheap shot. My opinion is that Silverlight is fantastic technology, the more we can do to get a compact CLR onto Linux or an open source implementation (perhaps via Mono) the better. Also V-1 isn’t a silverlight only codec, it is very broadly implemented, and besides you can use other codecs

Let’s all keep our heads here. Silverlight is not going to replace HTML / AJAX.

Silverlight content can’t be seen by search engines.

Silverlight = Bad SEO

No one is going to put all of their eggs into something that can’t be seen by Google.

Ive been following WPF/E stuff for quite a while now, before the rebranding and the CLR stuff was announced. I find it interesting, it has potential, but I cannot believe the level of hype that is coming from some quarters on this.

One thing that I thought gave it potential was how easily it would be for XAML to be generated server-side. Im interested in net video so I thought it also gave a shot in the arm to wmv,as this is currently a headache for mac users when confronted with someone who only makes their vids available as wmv. My interest in the video aspects is somewhat dampened by it only supporting .wmv files. If it could handle mp4 and h264 then I would be a big fan. These standard formats are becoming well apodpted in various hardware and software on the desktop, but playing mp4’s in the browser usually means quicktime browser plugin, which isnt ideal and has helped flash to dominate as the web video format. If microsoft could bring themselves to support mp4 flavours rather than just their own similar formats, it would help. I havent seen any announcement about this, but they have moved to include mp4 support in the latest xbox360 update so maybe thats a vague sign that microsoft may be forced to acknowledge mp4 more in future?

One of the things that worries me about Silverlight is that it doesnt seem to be very self-contained. Try their Expression Media Encoder thingy and see how many files are output when creating silverlight stuff using one of the built-in templates. Loads of seperate java files . This can be both a strength and a tremendous weakness depending on the circumstance. Maybe the CLR stuff as an alternative to using a lot of javascript will help, maybe it will have its own problems.

I take claims about the performance with more than a pinch of salt. Certainly on the Mac I am getting CPU usage for relatively straightforward apps, that is as bad if not worse than some pretty intensive uses of flash with video on various sites. The Visual Basic Clock sample was eating a huge amount of my CPU, so I will wait and see. The same goes for visual quality, how great the animation is, etc. I need to try the latest expression blend now that silverlight support has been added, as the tools were all previously wpf-centric and this didnt help evaluate how such things stack up against flash.

I worry about the mobile aspect too, I hope for support on mobile phones but I dont hold my breath, meanwhile I wait for flash lite 3.0 which will have flash flv video support.

The demos Ive seen are all interesting but they are the toys to me at this stage, saw more impressive uses of flash many years ago, and ajax & javascript are proving to be good and less risky for implementing some of the stuff that could be done with silverlight or flash.

I mean clearly flash & associated technologies have some weaknesses, otherwise we’d have gotten the rich internet experience sooner, with flash, rather than ajax. So there is hopefully room for silverlight. A lot will come down to the existing skills of the developer, I doubt too many people will migrate from flash in a hurry. But there must be a lot of people who never went near flash for a whole bunch of reasons, and some of them will hopefully