Silverlight – is web 2.0 finally here?
Hi, I’m a Mac… yeah, I wear jeans and quirky t-shirts. I have an iPod and a MacBook and I look at Windows people with a little pity but the last hour of the keynote presentation at MIX07 has made me tip my hat towards Microsoft. They are really onto something great here.
Enter Silverlight. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. This thing runs on anything and does anything. Literally. I encourage you to view the session videos on the MIX07 site. In particular the video editing software implemented as a web application! And the whole web app is delivered in 50k! It was made by Metaliq and is code named Topbanana.
The development tools are really excellent too. They showed remote debugging (from a Windows box) of a Silverlight application running inside Safari! It’s really slick and impressive and it all actually works.
For the love of all that is sane and pure… they are coding in Ruby, against .NET in TextMate! I think I want to have their children.
Now, Apple do some great tuff but they are concentrating way too much on the desktop. Microsoft
is really pushing the envelope with their new technologies.
Anyone interested in developing rich, web + service based applications should take a look at Silverlight technology. I think that MS re doing some great things in this space and this thing will become very dominant in this market space. Microsoft are even providing, for free, distributed hosting space for Silverlight content.
You can get the Safari/Firefox plug-in here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/downloads.aspx
Once you’ve got the plug-in, restart the browser and have a look at some Silverlight enabled sites here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/default.aspx
By the way, I should say thank you to Microsoft for sending me to this great event. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and to see new and promising technologies, not to mention meeting nice people and eating great food.