The Silverlight Platform Announced

The full announcement, plans and capabilities around the Silverlight platform were announced today at the opening keynote at MIX07. A subset of those details focused on the cross-browser/cross-platform media capabilities of the browser plugin were first unveiled at NAB, also in Las Vegas, a few days back. Ray Ozzie introduced the Silverlight platform as a combination of a cross-platform media delivery platform, an RIA platform as a new choice to build sophisticated Web apps, and a services platform (such as the new Silverlight streaming service). This will of course be making waves in the blogs starting today, or should I say "Lighting up the Web?"

The keynote featured Silverlight in a big way! Scott's section featured some amazing demos Silverlight around media, .net programming, dynamic languages, cross-platform debugging and tooling scenarios. It was great to see the .net programming model come to life powering data visualization in an itinerary planning app, as well as in a chess game beating the heck out of the equivalent AI logic implemented in script. I am a bit biased toward the .net integration, but I’ve been working on the managed programming model for almost a year, and can now talk about it :-)

I also loved the montage of WPF-powered applications (need to get hold of that video) that Ray presented. Truly inspiring stuff about what you can do with the Windows platform. The other big take-away from his presentation for me was redefining SaaS as "Software and a Service" bringing together the best of the existing world and the services world.

Michael Arrington interviewed Ray and Scott after the keynote. Michael's sole focus seemed to be about what he could blog about, which I thought was fairly odd. He mentioned something about desktop apps not being interesting to him, because he didn’t or won’t cover them on his blog! Strange... but Ray had a quick reply to that - "You will."

I am done with my first talk on "AJAX Patterns with ASP.NET", and tomorrow present on "Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls with Silverlight".