Silverlight - any of you learning or using this?

AARRRGH

You just know Microsoft are going to do a Microsoft with this one and get all the colleges teaching it to new students.

Is it a realistic threat to Flash?

Is it worth learning?

What's your opinion of this framework?

Goodshape

I outsource all my Silverlight production.



Nah, seriously though.. I use Linux as my main operating system and Silverlight isn't yet supported under Linux so, stubbornly, I don't yet feel the need to support SIlverlight myself.

pwd

MS are pushing it aggressively. The Silverlight Streaming service offers 1 million minute of dvd quality streaming every month for free.

The name is funny, especially when they currently claim it is not meant to be a replacement for flash. Flash = siverlight.

Silverlight 2 can be programmed with c# etc, and is integrated with .net. I think this is what is worth learning, rather than 1.1, which uses javascript afaik.

I want to learn it, and use it in projects. I think it will be buggy for a while and meet strong resistance competing with such an established product as Flash. But I think in the long run it will take up a large share of the market, and that getting experience of it early on will pay off later.

Bob the Builder

My brother is learning it in Sligo IT at the moment, and he hopes to have a reasonable grip on it by April/May. After my exams, along with other nerdy things, I have an intention of learning how to use it before anyone else does.

The predictions are that, in two or three years time, Silverlight will take up a large portion of the market, and will be a well paid job. I'm hoping to get in on the band wagon and delve into that, and Flash during the summer.

As has been said, works best with Vista Home Premium and Upwards, and is designed for a pretty intensive resource powerful computer, as in later versions, it will become more powerful, and more resource hungry. Because it's Microsoft who own it, you can be sure that they won't be in too much of a rush to expand to other operating systems, but if they keep pushing it as they are doing now, they will have to expand to Linux and Mac at least. It looks very promising.

~NevF

Edit: For those of you who dunno what silverlight is; http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

pwd

I don't know about them being too slow to port it to other operating systems. I think it is compatible with macs, and they are developing Moonlight (for linux). It would be stupid of them if they were overly slow about Moonlight since one of the biggest obstacles to its adoption will be the lack of compatibility at the moment.

Goodshape

They're putting resources (i.e. development time) into Moonlight but as far as I know it's largely third party. Also, from what I read, it's at best six months away from working correctly.

Could be wrong?

I do believe it works on a Mac anyway.

squibs

I really hope that kids in college don't spend too much time on this. In the DOS days the ms compilers were second best to the borland stuff. In the windows days borland delphi seemed to be a better solution than the visual suite soon after release.

And the asp/.net stuff is so proprietary, I can only assume the silverlight thing will be the same. I want my stuff to work on linux or ms hosts and display on all browsers the same. If ms wont commit to a browser rendering engine that is w3c aware, then I don't think their "flash killer" is going to be much to write home about.

Bob the Builder

thats the disadvantage of silverlight over something like flash. Because it's developed by M/soft, it's only natural to assume that it will be biased towards itself rather than linux or Mac. Whereas Adobe would put just as much time into Linux as they put into Microsoft because they aren't really biased, they're just trying to get as much people on board their software as possible.