Update: Listen to our podcast interview with Silverlight product manager Brian Goldfarb at TalkCrunch.
Today at Mix07 Microsoft made a number of major announcements, mostly around the recently-released Silverlight (formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere). Microsoft presented both new products and a new vision for how services and software will interoperate in the Microsoft and Silverlight ecosystems. Microsoft is providing not only the tools and software but they are complementing it with new services from their Live division. Microsoft have also demonstrated today that their vision is for all browsers and all web users, not just users of Internet Explorer, as a common theme during the keynote presentations was inter-operability with both Firefox and Safari, and working with the Mac OSX platform.
During the keynote the new Expression Studio applications were demonstrated to great effect. These are applications targeted at designers rather than the traditional Microsoft developer crowd, and Microsoft seems to have done a good job of providing a great suite of applications that designers can use to build powerfull web applications on Silverlight. Today also marks the official gold release of Expression Studio.
When Silverlight was first announced two weeks ago, it was all about a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web – in short, a competitor to Flash. Today, only 14 days from the original announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that Silverlight will also contain a compact CLR, allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages.
The CLR
The biggest part of the announcement today is that Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. What this means is that a subset of the full .NET platform that runs on desktops can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, with Silverlight you can code in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it.
The most remarkable part of the CLR are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in at around 4MB – which with current broadband penetration is effortless. Second of all the CLR is fast, very very fast. 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. Developers can simple take their existing Javascript and copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment. Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.
Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it – it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.
Multimedia
A lot of the demonstrations of Silverlight technology have dealt with multimedia – particularly online video, and Silverlight has a very strong hand in this area. Online video has traditionally been associated with Flash, and most users are familiar with the constraints that such video has such as quality levels and fullscreen viewing. Using Silverlight you can distribute multimedia as part of the application at quality levels up to 720p (high definition) and also in native full screen (not just a maximized browser screen). The demonstrations shown today were simply gorgeous, and we are finally seeing a web-based video distribution model that can compete with both desktop-based downloads as well as DVD and other offline content.
As with all Silverlight applications, video can be streamed down through IE, Firefox or Safari on both Windows and Mac OSX. If an application is doing just video and audio and doesn’t require the rest of the Silverlight CLR functionality, then the total download including the codecs required to play the stream will be around 2MB (it will be a bit bigger for Mac OSX as it is a universal binary). The install happens automatically, and doesn’t require a restart in IE which will probably result in video content sites being the first major distributors of the Silverlight 1.0 client across browsers. I expect that over time we will see a host of sites, especially those currently serving WMV of other formats into media player embeds, migrate their video serving to Silverlight.
Services
The same video sites that will be switching to Silverlight for content delivery will also want to consider one of the new web services announced by Microsoft today. The service is called Silverlight Streaming and it allows users and developers to host their Silverlight content and apps with Microsoft, taking advantage of their extensive global network of datacenters and their content delivery network. Best of all, this service is free, and while currently it is only in alpha it allows users to upload up to 4GB of content, and to stream up to 1 million minutes of online video delivery at 700kbps, around DVD quality. Starting right now, you can build a total video content site using Silverlight at no cost. The future for this service looks good as they will incorporate Silverlight Streaming with the MSN Video ad network to allow you to easily monetize your video streams and participate in a revenue sharing opportunity with Microsoft while removing your distribution costs. There will also be a premium level of content delivery where you will be able to pay for higher levels of usage – the cost for this service is as yet unknown but expect it to be very low.
Mobile
Silverlight was demonstrated today on a Windows mobile device as part of a new service that the NBL have built. The demo showed both Silverlight applications and media streaming running on a mobile phone – so Silverlight even at this stage is about more than just the desktop browser and desktop market. With windows mobile and Symbian now the two dominant mobile platforms, I can’t see any reasons why we won’t see Silverlight on Symbian as well – thus spreading the platform across the vast majority of both desktops and mobiles, something that alternative platforms have not managed to do.
What is next..
In all we should expect to see more services provided by Microsoft as part of the ecosystem. Ray Ozzie today spoke about a vision of services complimenting software – and announcing Silverlight Streaming at the same time as the new Silverlight client is an excellent example of that. Microsoft are clearly determined to position themselves as the premier provider of tools, software and services for the web.
Silverlight is excellent technology and those asking why developers and application providers won’t just stick to flash only need to look at XAML, the runtime speed and size and the flexible options with programming languages combined with very strong multimedia support to start to see the answer. Microsoft have a battle on their hands to convince the developer and designer communities that their platform is the best platform, but most of this convincing won’t be a technical showdown but rather the establishment of trust between users and Microsoft as the vendor of this new platform. That being said, Microsoft do have the largest developer community and the excitement from that community at the conference here today was very evident – so the question won’t be if there will be a killer Silverlight app but rather when, as Microsoft have given not just traditional Microsoft .NET developers but also many others a new playground in which to build very cool new apps.
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?).
To find out more about Silverlight, and to download toolkits and samples and particpiate in discussions check out the new Silverlight website at www.silverlight.net. Silverlight 1.0 will go gold sometime this summer.
Nik Cubrilovic has been a contributor to Techcrunch since early 2006. He writes a blog at www.nik.com.au and he is the CEO of Omnidrive
“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.tech...-its-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 find silverlight to be useful.
Personally I shall try it out for some prototyping and keep my fingers crossed that it catches on, but if I wanted to start a web service company in the next year or so then Id be taking a massive risk at this stage in going for silverlight rather than flash. I imagine it will definately catch on for people who embed wmv files into their sites. It will challenge flash and ajax in certain areas.
I hope people dont make the same mistake they did with flash in the earlier years, where the entire site is made with flash. I prefer the modern era where AJAX does most things and the likes of flash and silverlight have a useful place powering certain widgets or parts of the page, but not the whole shebang. Dont want web 2 going silly and dressing up like its web 0.5 or something.
I’m sure that silverlight is a great technology, but this article reads as an advertisement for it, not any sort of reporting. There isn’t a single negative issue brought up about silverlight in the article! No technology is perfect, especially on initial release.
>>Silverlight content can’t be seen by search engines.
yes it can dumbass. its pure xml that drives the ui
Gee Ronnie. You’re so polite.
XML drives Flash too, but you don’t see Search Engines loving Flash, do you?
According to Google Webmaster Guidelines (perhaps you’re not familiar with them):
“Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site”
We all know that Flash can draw from XML, but Flash + XML does not make your content accessible to alternative user agents and search engines.
Case in point. Let’s take a look at the Silverlight Demo page, shall we?
http://google.c...rlight.net/fox/
The only thing Google is able to see is the HTML Title field. It doesn’t have any interest in crawling the XML. I’m sure companies around the internet are going to LOVE that.
Micrsoft just rebooted the “title” tag.
(Who’s the dumbass now, Ronnie?)
IMHO, it’s very telling that several people have commended Nik for doing something that MS couldn’t — explain Silverlight in words that someone other than members of the internal development team would comprehend.
Also, I still don’t understand why smart people will invest the time and effort to use the Expression suite of tools when there’s no apparent and compelling value-add (relative to Flash tools they already know and use).
Even if MS gave away the Expression software for free, surely the learning curve is still a major roadblock for designers and developers who are scratching their heads on yet another MS last-to-market offering.
>>(Who’s the dumbass now, Ronnie?)
still you I’m afraid. Flash is NOT xml, it can load it, but its not xml. A swf is compiled bits and bytes. xaml IS xml, a format designed for both human and machine readablility. It REPLACES xhtml, its not a hosted like flash is.
you said
>>Silverlight content can’t be seen by search engines.
which is totally ill informed, of course xml can be read by search engines ( xhtml is valid xml and google seems to have no problem with that does it? ). The fact that google currently does not index it, given that the tech is only 2 days old, doesnt mean it can’t or never will.
you said it ‘can’t be seen by search engines’, but it can, so therefore you are wrong. youve posted your ignorant view of silverlight in both posts, making you look like double the dumbass. i suggest you stfu, close your browser, turn off your machine and think about how stupid you sound. html was invented in 1989, its time for a new markup language, get with the program or get left behind.
Obviously Google CAN read XML. After all, it is just text. No one is stupid enough to argue that (except maybe Bill).
But Google seems to choose not to crawl Silverlight content. Googlebot avoids displaying XML content to the public that’s intended for proprietary plugins — even when Googlebot is successful in crawling that XML:
http://www.goog...rlight.net/fox/
This follows Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:
“Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would”
That statement says it all.
Google wants to show results for content that’s accessible to all users, whether or not they have a proprietary plugin or not. For instance, blind users, deaf users, and users with alternative browsers (such as JAWS) would probably never be able to access Silverlight content. This doesn’t mean Google can’t see these files. But, it chooses not to show that kind of content because of two reasons: One, Google can’t verify if some of the XML content is spammy and hidden in the final visual display. Two: the content that’s within Silverlight doesn’t act like a typical web page, so it’s difficult to track linking relationships to and from RIA pages. Linking relationships to and from web pages are a big part of what dictates PageRank.
So, while everyone knows that Googlebot can see the XML. It’s very obvious that anyone who moved all of their content into Silverlight would be committing SEO suicide. Perhaps one day Google will start showing Silverlight content in its search results, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
And, if you’re a company investing millions of dollars into a website, you’d be foolish to not make your content accessible to ALL user agents (text browsers, audible browsers, etc.) and search bots.
Interestingly enough, Google does show PDF files (since PDF is now an ISO Open Standard), but PDFs usually don’t rank as well as an HTML file. Probably for the reasons you mentioned above.
That’s probably why you don’t see people making entire websites out of only PDF files. People who care about SEO know that there’s no substitute for (POSH) Plain Old Semantic HTML.
No matter how good Silverlight is (and it does look pretty good). I think people would be wise to use it sparingly — the same way they now use Flash.
I know that Silverlight can do animation. I have seen a few examples of the programmatic animation. But I haven’t found any example of the more “traditional animation” such as those done in the ecards of http://www.jacquielawson.com or http://www.ojolie.com. So my question is, can Silverlight do that kind of animation? If so, is there any example out there?
But their new website doesnt work, I click download and all the other buttons don’t do anything on their page, and the license link loads a blank. There’s not even a contact link anywhere to let them know it doesnt work. If in this day and age I cant view a website on my totally standard Fedora Core 6 x86_64 operating system with firefox, it might as well not exist. Sorry microsoft, not much of a competitor to flash, (which only barely works)
How did they make all that money anyway?
If Adobe will make wrong turn with supporting flash designers, Silverlight will automatically gain a lot of benefits in comparison with Flash. But I believe Adobe won’t.
Maybe I will care about this (or anything Microsoft does) if:
1) They didn’t constantly demonstrate that their business model is get you to depend on their technology and then make it a requirement that you use windows in order to use their technology.
2) They didn’t constainly demonstrate that they didn’t mind leaving ISV hanging when it came to real support on non-Microsoft systems.
3) Security is such an afterthought. How long until the first silverlight exploit? $100 says within a month. Anyone?
Thanks for the great explanation; can’t wait to try Silverlight. Puzzled why Microsoft went with the gossamer jockstrap logo though.
Even if Silverlight won’t change the market situation (i am strongly believe it will, since it has a good design plus Microsoft marketing), it will surely heat it up, making Adobe work more on Flash, which in the end is good for all of us. Concurrence is good thing for all products and developers – products get better or disappear if they are weak, and as for us(developers) – we will have more options to choose. =O)
Has anyone noticed that the letters ‘SVG’ are imbedded in the words Silverlight.
Whether Redmond actually wanted to pay homage, sincerely, or this was just some non-tech advertising dweeb’s syllable-sticker/trademark scanner/product namer program, the truth did out.
MS copped the commons code of Scalable Vector Graphics so maybe XAML should really be called SVG 1.3 and the CLR is really just CBASIC2008 or CB-8600 and so maybe it is time to rehabilitate Gary Kildal.
Now lets see if the text actually wraps properly.
Dear ggmike, and etc
More and more users daily move on to Linux, forget about m$ creating a shitty plugin to support linux OS, eventually someone like my self will evaluate what m$ has created and clone it, but that is not the point here.. Why do you insist to blow out a system that is as important as any other OS such as (in your case Mac)windows, also if you take a closer look at vista, you would realize that a lot of things it has are copied of from linux. Anyways.. some one here was right.. WHY!?!? would Microsoft really want to support Mac system’s when they only support there own? what’s the catch?
Sound interesting … But a user killer? I wonder if it is just a nich market.
this does nothing for the Internet community at large. another ‘metoo’ product from microsoft. the only good I see coming from this is a shot in the arm for Adobe.
Has anyone seen any examples of Silverlight that are search engine friendly? I’ve tested multiple instances including http://silverli...com/default.htm and don’t see how search spiders can read any of the information. Or does this have to be taken into account when building applications/sites with Silverlight?
Been using it for 6 months and I love it
They downloaded this program on my desktop at home and I had no clue what it was. I only use computer for personal use since retirement, then only used Office Suite never into programing or whatever this thing is for, Can I uninstall it without causing a problem?
avea parça kontör
You can do a lot of things with Silverlight even simulate entire windows system. Check this site http://www.windows4all.com.
Graet article for new silverlight learner like me.please update me for the same.
Sniff, sniff…
Smells like Microsoft money all over here.. nothing wrong with that though… cash is king even if it’s a fiat based currency..
oh yeah, flash does that too