Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers

ericatcw writes "At its Mix08 Web development conference, Microsoft said that its Silverlight rich Internet application platform is downloaded and installed an average of 1.5 million times every day; Microsoft has a goal of 200 million installs by midyear. But Silverlight is at the beginning of a long slog towards gaining traction. Computerworld did a quick analysis of job listings at nine popular career sites and found that an average of 41 times more ads mentioned Adobe's Flash than mentioned Silverlight. As expected only 6 months after Silverlight's introduction, the number of programming books carried on Amazon.com was also heavily skewed in favor of Flash."

Comments

Re:Why switch?

[MickDownUnder]

I've been developing .NET since day 1 (as in reading the white papers to using the first betas). I can tell with absolute certainty that Silverlight is not just an after thought add on to .NET for Microsoft. The basic constructs and security architecture leveraged by Silverlight have been in place since the first beta of the .NET Framework back in 2001, its a technology they have always planned to introduce, before Silverlight they released many browser deployable .NET applications, so the delivery and security mechanisms are well tested and already main stream.

I think you also need to think about the huge API available to Silverlight developers. Since the release of the framework Microsoft has been hooking .NET into every part of it's server and desktop platform. .NET is everywhere throughout every piece of Microsoft Technology, from ERP systems, accounting to gaming consoles.

Did you know .NET is on the XBox 360? Can you create flash content for a the XBox 360? Or any other gaming console for that matter?

Microsoft ships the .NET framework on mobile devices as part of the ROM. Does flash ship on ROM chips?

So in summary the demand is already there as huge amount of development goes on in .NET today and all of these companies will be able to leverage their existing code base through Silverlight far easier than what they could through Flash.

But that doesn't mean there's any reason to switch, I think Flash will be around for many years to come and will probably continue to dominate the more traditional Flash areas such as marketing. I think Silverlight will get some penetration in this area, however, I believe it'll more commonly be used for implementing clients for more sophisticated business systems that are looking for an easier way to deliver rich client browser based apps than developing them in HTML/AJAX.

So basically if you're sick of the sort of light on development you typically have with your average Flash marketing project and are looking to get into more serious project development, you might consider Silverlight as a good stepping stone into that arena.