How is Silverlight going to change the internet in the next few years?

Question

How is Silverlight going to change the internet in the next 10 years?

Is this going to be a scene changer or just another blip?

Answer 1

It will be another blip. It's not seriously cross-platform, unlike Flash or any of its other competition, and no one seems particularly interested in it. It might be neat and shiny but I haven't seen any real reason to move past playing around with it.

Put another way, it's a cool toy but not much else.

Answer 2

Until Silverlight has respectable implementations in other operating systems (read: OS X and Linux) and it can differentiate itself from Flash considerably, it's never going to grab a significant percentage of the rich content web app market, IMO.

Answer 3

I personally think Silverlight will be popular, its got a good "feel" about it IMO as a developer.

The cross-platform issue will be solved soon, as Mono continues to grow fast.

But I think it will be a very long time before anything knocks Flash/Flex off its perch on the top of RIA development platforms.

Answer 4

People often underestimate Microsoft. I don't know if it's going to change the Internet, but Silverlight will probably become pretty widely used, especially in web-based business applications that require rich interfaces. Flash is good, but being able to develop rich web interfaces with .NET and WPF is much nicer, particularly in that realm.

Answer 5

Silverlight allows the developer to offload some processing to a CLR on the client, using the native language such as C#, provide rich interfaces that are not restricted to HTML/CSS/DOM differences between browsers, and potentially reduce the need for scripting in javascript.

Answer 6

Although I might seem antagonistic here, I really, full heartedly don't like Silverlight, and I don't like Flash either.

They don't bring anything to the table anymore, now that browser are truly fast at rendering and processing. You can do most of the same things with pure Javascript and HTML/CSS. And what you can't do you will be able to do with HTML 5.0. What we need are not more proprietary frameworks, but better tools for what what we already have.

So my guess is 10 years from now, Silverlight and Flash won't be more than wikipedia articles.

Answer 7

I feel that while you can do most of what you need with Javascript and CSS, Silverlight programming feels much more fluid and fast to me. This is especially true when it comes to easily building a rich design with loads of animations. It is very easy for a team of designers and developers to collaborate on Silverlight and WPF projects, and that efficiency is important. Visual Studio being a fantastic IDE has kept many developers on the Microsoft ranch. The Expression suite feels like the next big advancement in allowing your IDE to do a lot of your work for you.

Deep Zoom is another big winner for Silverlight - check out the Silverlight implementation of the Hard Rock Memorabilia collection. Now look at the Flash implementation of SF Moma's art collection.

Answer 8

Don't knock Silverlight until you try it. I am no Microsoft fanboy, but it is very easy to use. People who have never developed using Microsoft technologies don't know the meaning of a good IDE.

I mostly develop with PHP, and I use Aptana for development. VS200x is lightyears ahead of any other IDE in just about everything.

The only real thing standing in the way of Silverlight becoming more widely used is better cross platform support; which would be pretty amazing thing I don't see happening at all. If Microsoft could loosen the reins up a bit, it would do wonders for it. Then again, Microsoft has gotten got at getting certain really good tools out there for free: The Express VS tools, the Dreamspark suite, etc.

Answer 9

One area that Silverlight will catch on is business applications. As architecture models shift into the service oriented realm there will be many companies looking to port their old client/server apps. Silverlight enables them to maintain the rich UI of the forms application while providing the messaging capabilities necessary to talk to the services. Also,t he deployment is wider than what they would get with strictly WPF and xbapps. Flash doesnt really compete in this area and a straight asp.net or other web technology front end, while getting nicer with Ajax and all that fun stuff, wouldnt support the richness you can get out of silverlight.