Silverlight - the next big thing? It certainly could be:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/30/silverlight-the-web-just-got-richer/
Some interesting points from the article:
- It’s a 4MB plugin for IE, Firefox, and Safari.
- A subset of the full .NET platform can be accessed from within the browser.
- You can code in C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby.
- Developers take their existing Javascript, copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment.
- Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM
- Silverlight Streaming allows users and developers to host their Silverlight content and apps with Microsoft, taking advantage of their extensive global network of datacenters and their content delivery network. This service is free, and while currently it is only in alpha it allows users to upload up to 4GB of content, and to stream up to 1 million minutes of online video delivery at 700kbps, around DVD quality.
With MS behind it, this could be huge…. Although i’ve not yet seen anything impressive that’s been made with it.
Nothing impressive yet as it is really alpha code still IMHO.
And it does not properly work with Firefox!
Plus, in true MS style v 1 and v1.1 incompatibilities so lots of V1 demos fail when you use the new “developer” 1.1 version.