Silverlight: do you love it or hate it?

Wow. Technorati is normally a wonderful resource, but with > 500 posts per day on Silverlight, it's really hard to see who's saying what. So I thought that I'd try and summarize a bit of what's been going on for folks who are interested in following the conversation:

Jon Udell interviewed me and added his insightful (as always) commentary.

Mark Pilgram hates everything

Darryl Taft of eWEEK interviewed Jim and me, and he also wrote a nice article on our MIX announcement.

ArsTechnica has a nice writeup on the DLR but the forum comments are also worth a read.

Scott Hanselman has a really nice writeup on Silverlight and the DLR. I love the energy flow diagram, the calling out of the DLR, the choice of license, and the awesome quotes :)

Miguel de Icaza really liked what he saw. I love how he uses terms like "adorable" and "fantastic" in describing technology. He also comments on our choice of the Ms-PL license for the DLR and Python/Ruby:

The release for the DLR is done under the terms of the Microsoft Permissive License (MsPL) which is by all means an open source license. This means that we can use and distribute the DLR as part of Mono without having to build it from scratch. A brilliant move by Microsoft.

David Laribee really gets the "Just Glue It" theme from our talk.

Peter Fisk, the Vista Smalltalk guy, is really excited about porting to DLR

For my work, two things are of importance: * the release of a CTP of the Silverlight CLR will finally allow me to examine its capabilities and limitations, so that I can proceed with porting Vista Smalltalk to Silverlight * the DLR should allow me to build a much higher performance version of Vista Smalltalk

Over the next several weeks, I will be preparing a new release of Vst/.Net to integrate with the DLR and be better synchronized with the Flash version (Vst/Flash). Hopefully, I can reach a point where scripts can be run with minimal modifications across Flash/Apollo/Silverlight/Vista.

And after he had a chance to play with it, he was even more impressed

This is very impressive technology that is certain to impact how applications are built and delivered. I think that it will mark the beginning of the broad acceptance of Rich Internet Applications in the marketplace - and this will probably benefit Adobe as well.

My congratulations to the folks at Microsoft for some excellent software engineering.

Michael Arrington is excited by Silverlight and Nik Cubrilovic has a more detailed overview on Techcrunch. They have >383K subscribers via Feedburner. Amazing.

Alexey Gavrilov really digs the DLR Console.

This is my favorite sample so far — IronPython, JavaScript and XAML console implemented on IronPython. It has syntax highlighting and code auto-competition already so I guess it won’t take long until we see complete IDE running inside the browser!

Finally, you know you've made the big time when you have your own Wikipedia page :)

Comments

[Robert]

With expression trees covered, is point 9 finally implemented for .net?

http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html

[Scott]

Love the idea of the DLR, heck love the idea of a portable CLR tucked inside the plugin.

Hate that the plugin is Intel only under OS X. Limits me to playing with 1.0 beta in my spare time (spare time? what's that?). Any idea if this is going to be true in the future?

Hate that 1.1 development is tied to Orcas and the fallback is text editing. Hand editing XAML files reminds me of doing Windows 3.0 programming.

Is there a "Ladybug" type MSDN bug reporting site for Silverlight bugs? I haven't been able to find one. Just posting bugs or questions in the forum at the community site.

[Mike Moore]

Looks like someone was able to build a Silverlight 1.1 app using VS.NET 2005...

Silverlight Hello World in C# from VS 2005
http://blogs.sqlxml.org/bryantlikes/archive/2007/05/02/silverlight-hello-world-in-c-from-vs-2005.aspx

[John Lam]

Scott,

There should be nothing that prevents you from building using VS 2005. You won't have some of the fancier editing support for XAML without Orcas though.

If you're an MSDN subscriber, I believe that you should be able to download a copy of Blend to do fancier XAML stuff.

[Sam Gentile]

What about your old Buddy Sam-) and his excitement psosts about the CLR and DLR?? -)

http://codebetter.com/blogs/sam.gentile/archive/2007/04/30/cross-platform-clr.aspx
"I have been preaching for 7 years now about that the CLI/CLR was designed for cross-platform and the rest was packaging. Today, the news from MIX '07 was very exciting on the CLR front as well as many other fronts (to be covered later). Today that become concrete with the announcement of full CLR support for Silverlight on Windows and the Mac!! Yes, that's right I can write the same C#/BCL code on both platforms!! Whatsmore I can use IronRuby"

http://codebetter.com/blogs/sam.gentile/archive/2007/04/30/new-and-notable-163-special-mix-07-edition.aspx
"Perhaps of the largest interest to many of us and to those outside the community the announcement of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) (see Larry O' Brian analysis here) and IronRuby!! (they put John to good use)"

http://codebetter.com/blogs/sam.gentile/archive/2007/05/02/new-and-notable-164.aspx
"Microsoft has definitely hit one out of the park this week at MIX. I have been talking with both Microsoft fans and "non Microsoft fans" and I have not seen this level of excitement in a long time. In fact, I think that this is the first time I have been excited about the CLR since the heady days of 2002 (more in a future CLR post)! "

[Alt experienced user]

I really hate Silverlight/Flash/JavaFx/etc! It will take my user control and transfer it to the webdeveloper moron payed by big corp. It will force feed marketing uglies and with sound and animations that just is in your face and take time of my life. My ideal webpage is a typical Wikipedia page- fast, no fuss, no monopoly, not security attacks, no code execution, no memory hog, Just the data - fast and compatible for small and big screens. It is all just a game to control the web from big MS - and it will fail big time when the silverlight viruses arive.