Is it worth it to learn Silverlight and develop applications using it?

Question

I'm mainly asking this to professionals who know the playing field of professional developing. Is it worth it to learn and develop skills in Silverlight?

I know that penetration for Silverlight is obviously low in comparison to Flash but Silverlight seems lighter and a more cutting edge technology.

What are some of the benefits Silverlight has over Flash?

Is there a lot of work for Silverlight developers (of course combining them with ASP.net)?

Thank you very much for all the responses. :)

Edit: I program mainly in C# so there will be an obvious plus side to using it. Also, how reliable are these results: BubbleMark

Answer 1

The fact that Microsoft has thrown their weight behind Silverlight as the Web Application Framework of choice gives it a pretty decent chance of becoming widely used (though certainly no guarantee).

To position yourself in the most versatile way, though, you might want to consider first learning about the capabilities and limitations of both systems and then learning how to implement with both.

There will probably be many projects done with Flash, and many done with Silverlight. If you can program to either, you will be in a good position. If you are able to provide skillful assistance in deciding which one is best for a given project, you will be in a great position.

Answer 2

It's a huge topic and you can read articles all day on Flash-vs-Silverlight-vs-AJAX.

I use Silverlight and was completely over the moon when it was released due to the ability to employ the CLR in browser based applications. Javascript/DHTML development drives me nuts and for me Silverlight was my way to escape its clutches. As far as Flash goes my very brief foray into it found ActionScript to be more painful than Javascript but that was years ago and things have undoubtedly improved since then.

Basically if you're using .Net for your back end then it makes perfect sense to use Silverlight for the front end. It means you only have one development environment and language to deal with and where appropriate you can reuse a lot of your back end code on the client.

In practice it's not quite that easy and my experience has been that there is a lot of resistance in user land towards Silverlight. The main bone of contention is generally that the cross browser and operating system support is not good enough. Users that employ Opera or use Linux or PowerPC Macs can't use Silverlight (Moonlight isn't there yet). Those users are generally vocal ones.

If you know all your users will be on IE/Firefox on Windows/Mac Intels or you have a compelling application that users will change their set ups for then Silverlight is almost certainly your best option. If you have an application that you want to hit a wide range or disparate users you may need to weigh up the options a bit more.

Answer 3

I tried it and did not like it. I didn't like the split development environment, xaml, or the limited install base and platforms it runs on. The IDE and platform itself still has a ways to go before I would consider it for use in a production environment.