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First Look At Microsoft Silverlight 3
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller finds Silverlight 3 gaining ground on Adobe Flash, Flex, and AIR in all the areas where Silverlight 2 had lagged. No longer do developers need to build desktop WPF apps based loosely on corresponding Silverlight RIAs, as Silverlight 3 adds the ability to install Silverlight apps on the desktop, update them in place, detect Net connectivity state changes, and store data locally and securely. Moreover, solid Expression Blend 3 and Visual Studio 2010 betas provide developers with much improved tools to create Silverlight RIAs. '"I do not expect many Adobe shops to give up their Flash, Flex, and AIR for Silverlight 3. I do expect many Microsoft shops to do more RIAs with Silverlight now that it's more capable and to create lightweight browser/desktop Silverlight 3 applications where they might have fashioned heavier-weight Windows Forms or WPF client applications," Heller says.'"
What would the web be without JPEG, GIF and PNG? Can you imagine what a hot mess it would be if you had to install proprietary binary plug-ins to view images on web pages? And if some of the plug-ins weren't available on your platform?
Then go in the other direction and imagine what the web could have been with a universal video format and vector animation format. That's the crazy amount of damage Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Real and the MPEG4 LA have collectively wreaked on the web at large.
So please, please avoid Silverlight (or Flash, for that matter). It aims to balkanize the web into mutually-incompatible, vendor-dominated fiefdoms in which the overwhelming incentive is to tax users for their access to data.
Moonlight supports Silverlight 1. Support for Silverlight 2 is in "preview".
Thus far the Moonlight project is "compatible" enough to tell you your version of Silverlight is out of date, and please upgrade.
That's not even close to what I'd call multi-OS or useful. Hell, I barely put up with flash (no-script saves the day most of the time). If sites are forcing Silverlight down my throat, I'll just not use them.
It has been around for a while and I'm sure it'll eventually get to 3.0 compatibility rather quickly
And I'm sure it'll remain consistently at least one version behind the Windows one, and still missing features, just as Microsoft would prefer. Moonlight has not even reached parity with Silverlight 2.0 as a final release, let alone 3.0.
Interesting that they focus on Flash/Flex as the competitor, when really the more important rival for developers' attentions is HTML 5, and the various APIs built on top of the open web (Google Gears etc).
If you're developing a web app, why develop using tech which will only ever work properly on Windows? I guess for a shop which thinks they'll never stop using Microsoft software for everything, it might seem like a good idea.