Using Silverlight as an excuse to get back on blogging....

What a great way to get back on the blogging scene (I hope it lasts, with all the things that are going on:-)), last week Mix conference in Las Vegas had a great announcement.  I personally didn't attend but a few colleagues went and did a great job of sending up to the minute update.  If you are a developer looking for new toys to play with, look no further... Silverlight,which was the star of the show at Mix, is a new client side technology from Microsoft that enables development of cool browser hosted managed apps and videos.  Yes, that means that you can use C# to build your apps and get them streamed into in browsers like IE and Firefox.  The Silverlight is very light in size and includes some of the Windows Presentation Foundation (A.k.a Avalon) libraries which allow you can build declarative and cool graphical and animation apps that can be hosted in the browser.  Check out this demo which is built with Silverlight.

What does Silverlight mean to Software+Service: It provides a nice platform to build Software+Service applications that provide rich user interaction and visuals while talking with a heavy weight service in the cloud.  It is like Ajax on steroid. ..... I hope more Microsoft Services take advantage of Silverlight and provide rich browser based interactions and I am sure you will start seeing more Live services provide richer experience using this technology.

As for me, I just downloaded Orcas VS to build some managed apps for some of our Software+Service scenarios.  Will try to post what my experience was.