Microsoft releases Silverlight 1.0
It was officially announced here and a decent overview is here.
Well for me the Linux user this means little to nothing being that
a) it doesn’t run on Linux yet (though in the future it shall, it’s nice to see the work support and Linux in the same headine from Microsoft)
b) when it does will I even have a way to develop these apps for them.
I won’t have a chance to play with it till I get home and jump on my windows box but it will be interesting to see how it has changed since I last played with it back after the Vista launch (before it was actually named Silverlight.)
The Flash player has around a 90% penetration and is going to be hard to overthrow but Silverlight should still make it to most windows machines once here is a “killer app” that uses it. I would say I favor Adobe because right now the most up to date flash player (9) is on most OS’s but it wasn’t till recent that 9 was on Linux. If they started having all release at the same time it would be great to see but I most likely won’t so this is a toss up between the 2.
Basically both serve a purpose that is not really the same, even though they overlap. I look at Silverlight as being a great way for someone who already has an app developed for the desktop to move that onto the web. Flex on the other hand is where you would develop a Rich Internet App and then through AIR bring it to the desktop.
I’ll still be playing with the Flex SDK
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.