So, one of the coolest things here at the conference is Silverlight. That’s the good news…the bad news is there aren’t a whole lotta sessions on it because it is not quite ready for primetime. The main one was given by Scott Guthrie, and it was really amazing (it helps that Scott is a great speaker).

This article details a few things:

1. The different versions of the platform
2. When it is coming out
3. Where it fits in the overall scheme of things
4. Highlights from the TechEd session
5. Finally, why I think it is going to make such a big splash

Silverlight 1.0
Right now Silverlight 1.0 Beta is available.

This provides the ability for someone to call upon Silverlight controls from pure Javascript. You can also call it with ASP.NET (as you might have guessed). The cool thing about this is basically any web developer can use it…like PHP, Ruby, Python? Cool, you can use Silverlight through pure javascript. This means that it is basically ready for any browser, or platform.

The focus of this first release is on video…playing videos, creating videos, and sharing them. The real fancy stuff can be found in…

Silverlight 1.1
If you are more daring you can get the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha. What does this give you? Basically, it gives you .NET (or at least a small part of it). With the Alpha you can begin to see the potential because you can use C# and VB.NET to manipulate and utilize Silverlight goodies. This is important because it utilizes the skills you have developed in WPF rather than forcing you to have a completely new one. Keep in mind though, that there are no plans of making the whole .NET framework available to Silverlight. Currently they are talking about 4MB rather than the full 50 MB. You get most of the really important stuff, but if you need the whole enchilada, you should stick with pure WPF.

When can I get it?
According to the devs, 1.0 will be released officially this summer (before Labor day). The big release (1.1) will be released “later”…the MS folks are really coy about that one. My guess it it will be out sometime this year, but who knows.

Important thing to note…since Silverlight is still a little ways off, if you want to start building up the skills you will need, you probably want to get started learning WPF in general since Silverlight is a subset of the full WPF framework.

Where does this fit in?
An important question is where does Silverlight fit into all this. I mean, on the desktop ya got the full WPF, and on the web you have ASP.NET and AJAX…Silverlight seems a bit “extra”.

“But Silverlight is so cool!!” That’s absolutely true, so another way to ask the question is…does Silverlight replace all those “old school” AJAX skills you learned for ASP.NET? The answer is no. They both have a place. Just like there is a place for Flash and HTML, there is a place for Silverlight and ASP.NET. According to Scott, if you have a data heavy page, you will still want to use ASP. Silverlight fits in where you want some interactivity with the user.

Also, if you are planning to build a REALLY heavy UI, then Silverlight might begin to suffer because the XAML would get too large and may slow down the browser. Now this is an extreme case, but if you do have some serious UI going on, you probably want to stick with ASP.NET rather than Silverlight. Today the same thing can happen if you have hundreds and hundreds of kilobytes of Javascript running in the browser. This can bring a browser to its knees in a hurry.

Highlights
So lets get down to the nitty gritty from the session shall we? Here are some of the different aspects of Silverlight that are worth noting.

• Silverlight is the first time that the .Net Framework will be deployed through the browser. This is a one time thing, and the download is pretty small, but the major benefit is that some of the .NET stuff can be run on the client providing huge performance gains. Better performance is always good.
• HTML DOM Integration - This basically means that HTML and Silverlight work well together.
• Flexible Data Support - Starting in 1.1, Silverlight will support advanced data stuff like LINQ and web services. In addition, data can work either sychronously or asynchronously (always good).
• One of the coolest demos showed off the framework’s high powered debugging. Basically Scott showed some Silverlight running in Safari on a Mac, then he used the remote debugging features to attach to the Mac from his Windows dev box and set a breakpoint and walked through the code the Mac was running. Really, really cool.
• Silverlight can work with any server technology. Since it can be loaded with pure Javascript, you can use any language with it.
• One of the questions asked was if MS was planning on making a Flash to Silverlight converter. Scott kinda snickered at this, but basically said “no”. However, there are already 3rd party companies that are working on this, so it will be possible.

So why do I think that Silverlight is going to be huge? Basically it comes down to accessiblity from a developer perspective. The need for animation and a “richer user experience” is already there. Currently it is dominated with Flash; however with Flash you have to really study and learn a completely new language to get good at it. With Silverlight, the skillsets that you probably already have will allow you to get started. If you are good with PHP, Ruby, or ASP.NET, then you will be able to use that language to go get some data and return it back to your Silverlight rather than have to learn yet another language (i.e. ActionScript) to have slick animations in your sites.

The key is to get users to adopt Silverlight. Right now Flash is on about 98% of all computers. Silverlight might be on 10%. Interestingly enough, this is why the 1.0 release of SL is focused on video. If you can get the top 5 video sites to support SL, then Microsoft expects a 95% saturation of the market in 1 year.

So there you have it. When I get back I will have a whole bunch of links and such for the demos that were shown here.

The future of web apps is looking awfully bright. Whether you love or hate MS, the fact that Flash finally has some real competition will be good for the web community as a whole. At the very least, it will be an interesting couple of years.