Excuse me while I ponder for a minute, but I'm continually surprised by the absolute prostration of some of the development community at the feet of Silverlight. It's filling the .Net blogspace like crazy right now, and many control developers are already shifting focus to it (Telerik and Infragistics, to name two), citing it as the "next generation" of the web. My project manager walked out of the Silverlight talk at code camp a couple weekends ago already trying to plan on how to convert all of our web products to it! Of course, he's programmed desktop apps for the last 15 years, and finds the ASP.Net page lifecycle burdensome, to say the least, so it wasn't too surprising.
Look at this post on "Real World" for crying out loud. Peter Seale has a rebuttal that does a great job at summing up my thoughts about the article, but one thing that continually fails to be addressed is "why". Why Silverlight? Why do we need it? Do we need to make web apps behave like desktop apps? Maybe developers do…. but the average web surfer today is a different story. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Joe Web will likely resist Silverlight unless it can be introduced seamlessly, won't degrade web performance/user experience, and user interfaces are developed properly… unlike when Flash was first introduced. The average web surfer expects a web page to act like a web page, and you have 4 seconds for it to load if you want to keep them there. When was the last time you enjoyed hanging out at an all-flash web site? And maybe last but not least, if a high-profile security exploit were to be associated with Silverlight at this juncture, it might be a lot of trouble for corporate adoption.
So if Silverlight is going to succeed, there is a lot to overcome. And maybe it's great for app developers, but content publishers still have many unanswered questions and it doesn't look like there are many answers right now. Not to mention, the demo applications that I've seen have run like turds on any machine older than 3 months, and the 1.1 Alpha release (1.1 alpha??) has drawn a lot of developer ire.
Don't get me wrong -- I heartily approve the concept. The point is, Silverlight needs to satisfy a lot more than just application developers. RIA's make up a small portion of the internet. The real web runs on content, from the Library of Congress down to your dog's Facebook application. And every time I hear Silverlight, a little voice in my head whispers "ActiveX ActiveX ActiveX"… I guess I'm still getting over that nuclear disaster. This reaction to Silverlight just reeks of the reaction to Longhorn during the first couple years of feature marketing (WinFS!), and we all know what happened to Vista. I'm going to sit on the skeptic fence for a little while longer.
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