More about Silverlight – Microsoft’s Flex / Flash Competitor

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Here are a few resources for Silverlight:

Silverlight download page – if you want to install it on your system. Interesting but obvious fact: Silverlight will automatically update itself unless overridden within the IE Browser controls.

Silverlight Forums – I’ll be lurking inside here checking things out.

Why Silverlight? – Basically a marketing blurb about all the great things Silverlight will do, in plain English.

Opinions about Silverlight: Silverlight: The Web Got Richer (TechCrunch.com)

The most remarkable part of the CLR
(Common Language Runtime)
are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in at around 4MB – which with current broadband penetration is effortless.

Second of all the CLR is fast, very very fast. In a demonstration today showing a game of chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude. Developers can simple take their existing Javascript and copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment.

Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.

Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it – it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.