The keynote today in Mix ’07 at Las Vegas was fantastic. Microsoft unravelled a ton of new technologies around their Silverlight runtime in the keynote by Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. There are tons of information about these in Visitmix.com website, so I will just cover the bullet points and what impressed me personally.

  1. Silverlight 1.0 Beta is released, this is around a 1MB download that renders XAML files, can be programmed with JavaScript and you have a “Go-Live” license for this. This plugin works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Apple Safari. I missed the Linux desktop support and so did few others who participated in a Panel Discussion on Open Source Interop session – but there is no word from Microsoft on whether Linux support is happening or not.
  2. This is the most awesome announcement. Silverlight 1.1 (currently in Alpha) Plugin will include an almost full .NET Framework runtime including support for dynamic languages like Ruby and Python.
  3. Silverlight Streaming – An oneline video sharing service from Microsoft. And the Expression Media Encoder to go with it.
  4. Simpler licensing and opening up of API of Windows Live Services

My personal take on Silverlight is this. I am super excited on the .NET Framework support. And at Vishwak we have been playing with it in its previous name “WPF/E” and I think this is a very promising technology, but the success for it against competition like Adobe Flash/Apollo depends on how large can Microsoft get its installed base quickly. It is a chicken and egg problem, but unless there is sufficient installed base, it will be difficult to get customers on board quickly.

There has been also announcements about IIS 7.0 Beta Go-Live recently.

Microsoft Mix 07 - Silverlight running in Mac OS Safari

Microsoft Mix 07 – Silverlight running in Mac OS Safari

References

Tim Sneath in his blog has listed great Silverlight webcasts that are great to quick start learning. He has also listed a great WPF Demo.

Scott Hanselman (my fellow RD) has posted this great entry on today’s annoucement on Silverlight and .NET Support.

Silverlight FAQ | Quickstarts | Learning Video | Scott Guthrie talking on Silverlight | Videos running parallel in a puzzle

Update 21/June/2007: Came across this good post from Scott Guthrie on various demos with Silverlight

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