Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

Silverlight brings .NET to the browser.

You can tell when you use it that it's a mish-mash of Microsoft's latest ideas for the framework. It's got a little XAML (but not all of it), some GUI controls (but not all of them), some .NET support (but not all of it), and some nice design time tools (but not all of them).

I looked at Silverlight 1 a year or two ago. It was just not ready. If you wanted to make a button, you had to draw it yourself with graphics primitives like rectangles and gradient fills. The plugin crashed on my browser a lot. But Silverlight 2 feels like a much more complete attempt at bringing .NET to the browser.

The stack of Microsoft tool downloads you need to develop Silverlight stands about 10 tall. You can imagine that it's painfully slow when you're trying to run all that shit at once on your computer. But the end result, the Silverlight experience that users have, is very nice. The interfaces are responsive, they look slick, and well, they are slick because they've got the programming power of .NET behind them.

My main complaint about Silverlight right now has to do with the completeness of the development tools. There is no WYSIWYG (please don't say Expression Blend), the process is memory hungry, and there are many subtle requirements that are neither documented nor reported adequately when an error occurs.

But the bottom line is it's close enough. You can actually build applications in Silverlight 2 that get stuff done. It's not as polished as Flex or Flex Builder but I'll take the .NET framework over Flex's API any day.

Thumbs up for Silverlight.