Currently looking into learn new technology and silverlight is on the potential list.
However, I was wondering, will the popularity of jquery and it's awesomeness reduce the adoption of silverlight and therefore the need and reward from learning it?
Cheers
Well, I think so... but I have no figures to prove it and no crystal ball.
You could look at it this way: learning Silverlight won't help with any other kind of web development (except in general terms), whereas whatever web technology you use, you'll likely need JavaScript skills.
I think another nail in the Silverlight coffin will be the powerful new CSS techniques being developed by Safari and the other browser vendors, for example:
http://www.the-art-of-web.com/css/css-animation/
If every browser supported that, would you even consider Silverlight?
Having said that, if you want to use video or massive amounts of animation on the web, Silverlight could be a sensible choice.
There are significant benefits to your user interaction being a first-class web citizen and not trapped in another frame (or dependent on a plugin).
It isn't perfect, but jQuery does remove a lot of the barriers to rapidly coding cross-browser javascript which can replicate many of the features that might encourage a developer to turn to Flash or Silverlight.
This is another instance of choosing the right tool for the right problem, but javascript's access to everything in the DOM and its ability to gracefully degrade make it a pretty versatile tool, and a great framework like jQuery (that removes much of the programming pain) just helps it to be even more so.
I really hope it does. Let's hope the web becomes a set of open and standard friendly components, not just a bunch of black box stuff like flash and silverlight...
While my answer is no, jQuery hasn't affected my decision to adopt Silverlight, I also want to say that I never even considered Silverlight for the times where I chose to use jQuery.
I believe they are suited to different uses - jQuery allows rapid manipulation of the DOM and Silverlight sets up its own environment. So if I wanted to do something that a BROWSER would not let me do, I would use Silverlight: i.e. draw on a canvas (yes, I know about the browser canvas - but really?? that's no comparison to WPF) or stream video in a nice player, or open multiple concurrent connections.
jQuery is a nicer API than the existing browser DOM API. And that's its usefulness. But I wouldn't compare it to Silverlight because it's like comparing a kitchen to a whole house.
Yes, there is a trend of HTML and JavaScript being used to produce the kinds of smoothly animated active interfaces that were previously only possible with plugins — and this will continue much further should in-browser SVG, canvas and video catch on*.
This is definitely a Good Thing: open standards, direct browser support and authoring simply by updating text files is a huge win over closed plugins tied to specific development environments.
But I think you give jQuery too much credit on this issue. Certainly jQuery.Effects makes a selection of simple animations more accessible to a greater range of web authors, but that's only a small part of what jQuery is for, and a small part of the range of interactive effects possible. There are many other frameworks than jQuery, and many of the more impressive efforts are using their own code rather than any framework.
It's the increased JavaScript performance of modern browsers, coupled with some new features here and there, that makes “rich” UI possible without plugins. Frameworks merely make using some of those features easier.
(*: Which largely depends on whether Microsoft develop IE to catch up with them or whether they shun such improvements as a threat to their own technologies like Silverlight. Although there will always be a place for plugin-based rich apps, Silverlight is more vulnerable to native HTML apps because it doesn't have the widespread penetration Flash has worked up over the years.)
If there was a standard open source alternative to everything Silverlight did that was supported cross browser I'd be all for it. As long as Javascript is the only choice for client side code in the browser I'll be looking for alternatives. Silverlight appeals to me because of the .NET framework support so I don't need to have yet another language to be proficient in. Some people love Javascript, I'm just not one of them.
If you are looking at the benefits of learning the technology, you should realise that an investment in learning Silverlight will get you WPF for free. They are very closely related environments.