Silverlight (XAML in browser, cross-platform) launched
Sep 5th, 2007 by Joe
TechCrunch reported today that Microsoft officially launched Silverlight. I’ve been working with XAML for a couple of years now since the early betas in real world applications and it is very cool technology that makes it easy to build sophisticated UI.
Silverlight is similar in deployment strategy to Flash in terms of using a lightweight runtime plugged in to the browser, but what is more interesting is that it is running on top of a cross-platform .NET CLR (runtime). The combination of XAML with C# code behind might also be more compelling than ActionScript.
I’ve thought about using Silverlight to build some widgets, mainly because I am already experienced with XAML and .NET development so I could build them pretty quickly, but it remains to be seen how it is going to interact with services like MySpace and Facebook, etc. Presumably MySpace will block it, but we’ll have to wait and see.
You can check out Silverlight at the Official Silverlight homepage.
