Silverlight is here
I watched the keynotes from the MIX07 conference and I have to say I'm rather impressed at Silverlight. I've been on the cusp with regards to WPF/E (and WPF for that matter) but after watching ScottGu talk about it and demo some pretty kick ass apps, I've gone over to the dark side.
Maybe Microsoft won't say it out loud, but this is the Flash killer. I was always impressed with Flash because of it's rich nature. Watching Strong Bad cartoons in Flash was always fun. However I had a bad taste in my mouth with Flash. It was a giant tag on a web page, required a completely different language to learn, and was never really browser or search engine friendly. Sure, it looked good but that was about the extent of it.
A couple of things that came out of MIX07 so far is not only the availability of Expression Studio, the web authoring tools that are sure to take the place of Flash Studio and Dreamweaver (which each member of MIX gets a copy of), but of the Silverlight Streaming service. Basically you can upload 4GB of content to the Microsoft data services and use it in a Silverlight-enabled app (web, desktop, or otherwise). Not bad for free as in beer.
A few other cool things that came out of the keynote (once ScottGu got on stage) was remote debugging to a remote machine (he debugged from a PC to a Silverlight app running on a Mac, way cool) and the full .NET framework embedded into the Silverlight runtime enabled apps (not sure how to state this feature). So rather than the trimmed down compact framework, it's the full meal deal. There's also some great compatibility between Expression and Visual Studio Next (Orcas) as they use the same XAML files and same solution formats. You can basically build the UI that you want in XAML using Expression, then just save it and reload it in Visual Studio to use in your app. I was highly impressed with the Silverlight Airline app (hopefully source code will be available for this) which let you choose a set of dates, drag and drop an origin and destination, and with 3 lines of code Scott was able to show animation between routes and alternates when you selected each itinerary. Way cool and the way the web should be compared to the archaic way things are done now.
Finally was the question of performance. Sure you can build awesome apps that look great but what about bandwidth? Apparently Microsoft has solved this problem so you'll start to see very right web sites using Silverlight, video enabled (even HD up to 720p), downloading in as little as 50k. This might be a bit of a bait and switch game as the app will be 50k but obviously the HD content will be larger. The point here is that it seems like Silverlight will know how to download content in a smart fashion so it's there when you need it, but you won't be staring at long loading screens. One example was with NetFlix where they streamed an HD movie with pretty good response time, from a Silverlight app. Impressive. Most impressive.
You can install Silverlight here and download the SDK and other tools here. There's the 1.0 beta version and for your really on-the-edge guys, you can grab the 1.1 alpha releases. I'm now spending the rest of the night playing with Silverlight, getting boned up on WPF (finally) and putting together my own mashups so maybe watch for a few SL apps pop up here and there from me (as I tried to Frankenstein Silverlight and SharePoint together).