Is Silverlight for real?
Most of my team gets pretty excited about new technology, and we really enjoy digging into new things. So we're all pretty excited about the concept of Silverlight, especially in v1.1 with built-in CLR support.
I have two big questions though:
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Is Silverlight supposed to be taking on Flash head-to-head?
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Will Silverlight become a common, standard plugin, like Flash?
Let's face it, Adobe owns the market pretty well at this point. Thousands of Flash developers have mastered the strange world of Actionscript and timelines. We try to avoid Flash like the plague but always seem to be stuck working with it, and it's no fun. The idea of being able to add a rich experience to the front-end without having to bring on Flash people is really cool in my mind, but I'm still sitting on the fence about jumping in. Is Silverlight really going to be just another necessary plugin that people install without hesitation? Is it something that we can tell our customers that they need to have as a standard on their PC's? Is this a platform that's worth taking a shot at?
When we moved to .NET as our primary development platform, I felt it was a big leap...there was some risk but I felt that the potential rewards were far greater. This turned out to be the case and I'm really happy we did it 4 years ago. I'm getting the same kinds of feelings about Silverlight now, and I'm still trying to figure out if it makes sense to take a plunge and see where we go.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share!