Grrrrrr

I'm glad MS has come out with Silverlight 2. I was seriously looking into learning Flex (Adobe's RIA developer framework) as a Web front-end.

Hehe. That move may help reusing existing code, but if the result is just ActionScript, there won't be any speed benefits.

Silverlight is compiled code and it is and will be much faster for processor intensive tasks. .NET wouldn't have much point, if C#/C++/VB.NET etc were just compiled into VBScript or JavaScript :D

Ya, Java compiled into ActionScript is like C# compiled into VBA... or something like that :)

My kids are 3, 6 and 9...
How do I explain to them the mess we've created? ;-/

I suggest saving up for therapy.

This is just the start of a research project with no apparent progress at this point. It could be a good 6 months before there is anything significant to show. This is a classic technique of getting people to hold out for your next big release with lots of promised features when there is a viable alternative available sooner. IBM, Sun, Apple and Microsoft have used these techniques for years. Remember all of the amazing features that were going to be in Vista a couple of years before the release that made it sound so much better than MacOS X? The same happened between Xbox and PS/3. Over-promise and under-deliver just to stifle the competition. A proposed idea of an amazing product can give you nearly the same competitive advantage as an actual product.

To be really effective adobe should allow .NET code as well. Without it the .NET community will continue to adopt Silverlight.

@isuttle and that is why everyone that says Silverlight will just die out is dreaming. It is big int he .Net community and that is not a small thing to dismiss lightly!

@offwhite,

Ur completely right. Silverlight has been out for a year now. In development for probably another 6 months. So thats about 1.5 years from 1.0 beta -> 2.0 beta (which will be out at MIX '08) AND we still don't have the version that the developers want 2.0. So, assuming 2.0 comes out in September...then you are talking about 2 years of development time.

I think MS has the edge over Adobe here as they have control over the .NET libraries where Adobe has to write "hooks" into these other languages.

I am not big on making a big deal about stuff most of the time, however Silverlight will be huge in my opinion in several key areas. I can see it be HUGE in the arena where Flash games own right now. Silverlight 1.1 BETA with .NET is proven to be 15x faster with complex math/physics that Flash/Flex can ever be. The video encoding is also impressive in scale and customizability. Also a lot of applications that are these "hybrid" desktop/web apps fit a lot better with Silverlight than Flash and probably easier to develop. Silverlight isn't going to have the ridiculous share like flash has (like 95% or something), but I think it will be big enough in a lot of areas to grow in the next 2-3 years. Lots of opportunity here to make $