I've been working on various aspects of Silverlight since sometime last year. The project has been going on much longer than that. It took a while for the managed API to come online and then even longer for good tools support, and all of this is before the product was announced. And all that time, you'd think that folks close to the product were generating a ton of samples and cool apps. Well, not really. There were some, but most folks (including me) were just cranking on getting the thing ready for Mix and then the refresh/RC that followed.

So, I'm now happily playing with the product. I'm in the middle of creating a photo gallery website for myself to replace the lame DHTML site that I wrote back in 2003 on ASP.NET v1.1.

I'm left with some random thoughts on the product and how it affects and empowers developers:

• Compatibility between the server, the web-client (Silverlight) and the client (WPF/Winforms) is incredibly important
  • At the very least, developers benefit from knowledge transfer across the platform
  • Compatibility makes life easier for developers
  • More importantly, it opens up a ton of interesting scenarios between the different parts of the platform
• A highly flexible and easy to target ActiveX control is liberating
  • I've written a bunch of javascript to improve user experience in the browser. I'd be happy to never do that again, given that the development experience is pretty bad.
  • You can create amazing visuals and immersize experiences that would never be possible with Javascript.
• Silverlight also opens up a lot of questions for its use in the browser
  • Do you use Silverlight for your entire site, or only the parts that make sense?
  • What do you about navigation, particularly as it relates to forward and back buttons?
  • What do you do about folks that what a URL for a specific part of your site to send around, or return to later (bookmark)?
  • Flash has been around for a while, and has all of these same problems. Some sites use Flash for ads, others for widgets and still others that do the whole site thing. I've always disliked the whole site thing as a user.
• Silverlight has an opportunity to hugely improve on the current Web experience
  • Most importantly, we've just let lose all those managed developers out on that ;)
  • This is the start of real internet applications, and of much more interesting web sites. Cannot wait to see what Amazon chooses to do.
  • This opens up a new x-browser (and OS) application platform to developers
  • Flash isn't always the best experience. It does crash and you sometimes get this dialog about 'waiting for a long-running script'.
• Is this yet another Microsoft technology that developers have to learn?
  • Yes and no. If you know WPF already, then you'll be at home.
  • If you don't know the .NET Framework, then Silverlight is a great way to learn an impressive set of basics.
  • There are some differences to learn, but it's all minor
• Is Microsoft serious about x-brower and x-OS?
  • Yes.
• Are .NET Framework teams stoked about Silverlight?
  • Last time I checked ;)

As I work more on my photo gallery site, I'm pretty sure I'll develop more thoughts and hopefully some answers to some of the questions that I've raised.