Silverlight going forward

  • Article

Last Friday during PDC 2010, President of the Server and Tools Division at Microsoft, Bob Muglia was interviewed by Mary-Jo Foley on HTML5 and Silverlight.

The way in which the interview was interpreted has caused some feedback from the Belgian MSDN  community and we feel it appropriate to point you to some guidance on Microsoft’s continuous focus on Silverlight. Microsoft is in no way abandoning the investments in Silverlight, it remains a strategic developer technology from Microsoft, and our continuing investment and focus provides us with an incredibly compelling and differentiated developer platform for the future. 

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer commented on the subject in his PDC Thoughts post:

“Client applications are important to take maximum advantage of devices, and we will deliver rich platforms and frameworks that enable developers to best take advantage of them. […] Developers can build great applications for it using Win32, .NET, Silverlight and HTML5.“

And Bob Muglia has posted a follow-up to his interview on the Silverlight Team Blog, from which these are 2 quotes:

1.Silverlight is very important and strategic to Microsoft.
2. We’re working hard on the next release of Silverlight, and it will continue to be cross-browser and cross-platform, and run on Windows and Mac.
…

Bob ends with an important statement:

“The purpose of Silverlight has never been to replace HTML, but rather to do the things that HTML (and other technologies) can’t, and to do so in a way that’s easy for developers to use. Silverlight enables great client app and media experiences. It’s now installed on two-thirds of the world’s computers, and more than 600,000 developers currently build software using it. Make no mistake; we’ll continue to invest in Silverlight and enable developers to build great apps and experiences with it in the future. “

In summary

  1. Silverlight is very important and strategic for Microsoft and we’re working hard on the next release
  2. Silverlight is a core application development platform for Windows and Windows phone 7 and it will continue to be cross-browser and cross-platform, and run on Windows and Mac
  3. Three core scenarios for Silverlight usage are:
    1.  Enterprise business applications / Line of business (LOB) applications
    2. Client applications for devices 
    3. Media Experiences 

Gill Cleeren, Belgian Microsoft MVP and also our Regional Director (however not affiliated to Microsoft at all), has made two very interesting posts on the matter. His views are highly recommended to give you insight on the :

Mike Taulty, a colleague Developer Evangelist from the UK has a very thorough post on the subject, which we also highly recommend: Silverlight *versus* HTML5? Really?