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I only just caught up with Silverchair
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I'm currently looking into Silverlight because we have big problems building our ASP.NET AJAX web sites in a way the customer is happy about layouting possibilities and user experience.
As a developer it is very comfortable that from now on we can use .net to program on the client side instead of JavaScript (same language/framework on both server and client  )
In this area Silverlight has much to provide. But up to now it is a bit to Alpha.
-^-^-^-^-^-
no risk no funk
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I've looked at it but not sure when I'll put it to use.
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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...isn't excited to see the response from this survey. 
Marc
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Though I'd like to see more than 297 (at time of post) votes
regards,
Paul Watson
Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote: And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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At them oment the surveysay:
I don't know what Silverlight is: 122 votes, 27.98%
Than means more than one out of four browsers won't have the plugin.
I guess Microsoft will force the IE users to install it via automated updates...
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There is no proof for this sentence.
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offcourse
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Silver is grey, is it? It can become black, but in combination with "-light" it must stand for 16 million kinds of grey. By the way, the "silver" visual style in Windows XP makes all window borders and headers light grey.
Who had the glorious idea of naming a multimedia system "silver light"?
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There is no proof for this sentence.
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It is a better name than WPF/e
(Just like Avalon, Indigo etc. were better names too.)
regards,
Paul Watson
Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote: And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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It could have been worse. Anyway, Rainbowlight would have been a better name. Looking at common Flash movies on the Web I'm tempted to say Flickerlight would be the best name.
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There is no proof for this sentence.
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does it matter? who cares about the name? as long as the product works thats all I care.
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There are people who see silver more than just a gray metal. Maybe the designers are Goths.
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I grudgingly use Flash when I have to and it is far more compelling than Silverlight at this point (penetration being the main "compellor".)
Silerlight simply does not fit the way the web works best (text based, lightweight, open) and I cannot recommend it to any web-developer.
regards,
Paul Watson
Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote: And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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I'm currently demoing Silverlight, and so far, we're swaying on the side of Flash. Things may change as the final comes out, but right now Flash is in the lead.
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Paul Watson wrote: text based, lightweight, open
Can you explain that a bit more? Is Silverlight binary-based, heavyweight, and closed?
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I don't want entire apps embedded into my web-pages that are separate from the main DOM. I don't want them playing by different rules to the rest of the web-page.
Most of the reasons I don't like Flash pertain to Silverlight. They haven't done anything new there.
regards,
Paul Watson
Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote: And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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That explains why you don't like it. Can you explain why Silverlight is closed, heavyweight, and not text-based?
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Judah Himango wrote: closed, heavyweight, and not text-based?
Closed because Microsoft controls it. Yes it has standardised elements and other people can create Silverlight plugins (though I'm not that clear if anyone can or if you need to work with Microsoft) but it is their spec, their defined interfaces and all sitting on the .NET way. No third party can come into the Silverlight working process and change it for the better if it conflicts with what Microsoft wants. To a degree all systems have stakeholders with vested interests but not as bad as .NET has.
Then they throw a lot of tools at you which is cool except they don't work on anything but Windows. I assume other tool providers could support it in (and presumably there are already XAML tools out there for other platforms) but once again they'll have little say on the system they are building tools for. I could hack it all with a text editor but...
Heavyweight because last time I checked XAML and all that is a literal translation of the .NET namespaces which means.I.end.up.twenty.levels.into.some.astronaut.architected.architecture.to.get.a.button.to.display. Heavyweight because it is an island of embed in a sea of open HTML and JavaScript. Embeds are heavy, put several in a page and watch your site start to crawl.
I take "not text-based" back, a bit, because I now vaguely remember you can have a text source file attached to the embed which is cool. Except AFAIR that isn't the recommended way. Rather a compiled .NET binary, right? I may be wrong there. I got scared at the .NET namespaces and stopped looking at Silverlight.
In many, many ways Silverlight is way better than Flash and I'd use it (once it has reached high penetration) for media files.
Naturally I'm getting details wrong here and you can nitpick but the general direction of Silverlight is very much Flash Done Right. It's like what they did when they made .NET and C#. Look at Java, copy the base, copy some good bits, fix some bad bits and regurgitate out onto the world. Not bad for the status quo but... still, status quo.
My major complaint is Silverlight's island mentality. You can see Microsoft want people to start moving everything into their Silverlight island until we reach a point where we don't need the wrapper HTML and then we don't need the browser and boom, we are back on a Microsoft desktop. Sure, it works on OS X and Linux but that's cheap kool aid.
regards,
Paul Watson
Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote: And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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Sounds like your real problem with it is that it's a Microsoft product, and we all know Microsoft is trying to make money by locking us into Windows and Office.
I sympathize with such feelings.
At the same time, I do feel there is a bit of hypocrisy here, not necessarily by you, Paul, but by others who share that feeling of angst against MS, yet turn a blind eye to blatant vendor lock-in by other vendors, including Apple, Google, and Sun.
Anyways, for someone like me who writes desktop apps, which aren't text-based, are heavy-weight, powerful, etc, Silverlight is interesting to me, as it allows me to transfer a lot of my knowledge of desktop apps onto the web. But for you, as someone who codes up Ruby on his Mac, maybe not so much.
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Replace Microsoft with any single vendor and I get annoyed. Adobe with Flash for instance.
I don't want a single vendor solution anymore. It leads to long term problems that I can't fix. The problems you get with open systems are numerous but I can actively work at them and influence them e.g. W3C.
And I'm sure you don't mean you are going to copy your desktop knowledge verbatim to the web. Host .NET desktop designed apps in Silverlight embeds. That chills my blood
regards,
Paul Watson
Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote: And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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Paul Watson wrote: any single vendor and I get annoyed
Then shouldn't you be happy at the prospect of Silverlight, given the stranglehold Flash currently has on rich web apps?
So you get annoyed that Mac hardware is only available pretty much from Apple, iPods don't work well or at all with 3rd party music downloading software, and the iPhone doensn't officially support 3rd party applications at all? If so, that's cool, but I suspect you're in the minority -- I find people who love their choice of technology turn a blind eye to the things on their own side.
Paul Watson wrote: I'm sure you don't mean you are going to copy your desktop knowledge verbatim to the web.
No, it just allows an easier transition of skills than, say, ASP.NET or other web frameworks.
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Judah Himango wrote: Then shouldn't you be happy at the prospect of Silverlight, given the stranglehold Flash currently has on rich web apps?
Flash doesn't have a stranglehold on RIA.
And Silverlight is the wrong way to bring choice to the market. Now I get to choose between two evils instead of one. It is offering one dictator for another. Not much progress.
As for your Apple argument you are right and I'd love them to open up but Apple isn't the web and they aren't even offering a web technology. I don't develop using Apple.NET or Apple C# or AppleAML.
As a web developer I am pretty happy with the iPhone direction. I've been working with J2ME, FlashLite and Symbian developers and the mobile app. story is horrible. OpenMoko sounds cool but jeez, have you used it? Awful.
With the iPhone you get a clear path; your website either works as-is (and most except Flash/Silverlight dependant sites do) or you design for a certain screen size. Good HTML, CSS and JavaScript works cross-browser and is not targeted at Safari/webkit. The only limitation is screen-size which is a pragmatic one and applies to every device on the planet that has a screen.
There is nothing iPhone specific in my iPhone friendly web-app. It works on a co-workers PDA wich has a similar screen size.
As a web developer there is only one app. I use that ties me to Mac OS X; TextMate, a text editor with good alternatives on every platform.
I can swap back to Windows easily enough or onto Ubuntu. It would be disruptive but after a few days everything would be fine again.
If I was in the .NET and Silverlight world I'd almost have to be on Windows. Mono is nice but not seriously usable yet and they have to scamper every time Microsoft update .NET.
I've chosen Mac as a development tool. I haven't chosen Mac as my development system.
regards,
Paul Watson
Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote: And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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Paul Watson wrote: Flash doesn't have a stranglehold on RIA.
Really? Tell me more about that. I can't remember the last time I saw a rich internet app that didn't use Flash, barring perhaps some little Mozilla XUL apps which aren't anywhere near competing against Flash.
No Apple.NET, but plenty of Apple-specific technologies nonetheless...Cocoa, Objective-C, iPod as a platform, iPhone as a platform, and so on.
Paul Watson wrote: Mono is nice but not seriously usable yet
That's not true. I remember seeing the top 10 Linux app downloads from a Gnome-focused site some time ago. At least 3 of the apps were built with Mono. One of the larger .NET desktop apps, Paint.NET[^], an excellent alternative to the closed and expensive Adobe Photoshop or the hideous user interface of Gimp, also runs on Mono[^].
Now, if you're always using the latest and greatest bits, e.g. you're already building WPF and Silverlight apps, then Mono will lag behind a bit. But as this poll indicates, not too many people are on the bleeding edge of building serious apps using alpha versions of software.
In the end, I suspect Silverlight will simply be a Flash competitor: most sites won't be built with it, but it will provide a better alternative to Flash when you need things like media playback, rich UIs, or even 3d; stuff that can't be done with vanilla HTML + CSS + script.
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Judah Himango wrote: Really? Tell me more about that. I can't remember the last time I saw a rich internet app that didn't use Flash, barring perhaps some little Mozilla XUL apps which aren't anywhere near competing against Flash.
Name a major RIA that uses Flash. Not some cool technology demo or Adobe technology showcase.
Most rich major websites use HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, GMail, Flickr (who ripped out their Flash based bits and replaced with HTML, CSS and JavaScript), Salesforce, Google Analytics, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Outlook Web Access (which David Wulff showed me is a massively used product) and Zimbra.
The top websites don't do RIA yet (MySpace, Google, Yahoo! etc.)
I had a look at Adobe's list of RIAs[^] and none are major websites. Nike is a big company but it isn't a big website.
Judah Himango wrote: No Apple.NET, but plenty of Apple-specific technologies nonetheless...Cocoa, Objective-C, iPod as a platform, iPhone as a platform, and so on.
Like I said, I don't do Cocoa or Objective-C and I don't develop for the iPod. For the iPhone it is through a standards based web-browser, nothing Apple specific in it (except a few meta tags which you can ignore anyway.) The iPhone friendly app I am working on works in Internet Explorer on Windows.
regards,
Paul Watson
Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote: And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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