Last week Tech Ed US (developer edition) kicked off and one of the key announcements of the keynote was the announcement regarding Silverlight 2.0 beta 2 which is now available.
Why consider Silverlight?
There are two key reasons to consider Silverlight in my opinion.
1) Platform independent. The Silverlight runtime is available for Windows and Mac and supported in Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. Not only this but it is small too. When someone hits your silverlight page for the first time the download is only 4.6 Mb and installs in 10 seconds. There is no requirement for the .Net framework. The runtime includes everything you need to run silverlight applications – including a tiny version of the .Net CLR. There is also a community project to run Silverlight on Linux called Moonlight.
2) .Net based. Silverlight is .Net based, meaning that you can use the tools you are used to for developing Silverlight applications. Not only are the tools the same, but many of the class libraries are also the same, and of course you can develop in a variety of familiar languages and take advantage of new language features such as LINQ. In addition Silverlight is based on XAML – the same technology as WPF.
Going forward Silverlight will be a very important platform for Microsoft. The web is growing in its importance and applications using the internet need to be richer but not heavier, and of course cross platform compatibility is critical. Silverlight fits the bill perfectly allowing rich applications to be built with a very lightweight foot print on almost any device. Check out http://silverlight.net to see what has already been done with Silverlight.
Where to start
If you have been doing web development and want to get started looking at Silverlight you can get the tools from http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/. If you want a sample to look at you’ll want to take a look at the starter posts that Scott Guthrie has put together here and here.
I’m thinking of doing my next unplugged sessions on a Silverlight primer for developers. If you want me to come to your town with this topic, drop me a note here.