The Rise of Silverlight

I can't imagine that there's anyone doing media that hasn't seen Microsoft Silverlight (or at least heard of it) by now. Gotta admit, it's pretty slick. Cross-platform (ok, Win and Mac right now, but thet've got Linux on the radar), integrated with Visual Studio, .NET implementation. I went to a MSDN roadshow last week, and the evangelist coded up a very cool vector-based button with gradients and animated hover states using SIlverlight lickety-split. The multiple-videos-streaming-at-once was pretty cool, too.

Don't have to name the specific target ot this MS initiative, and it may not be a killer-app for that space, but it does open up the media "door" to the mainstream development world. Certainly worth keeping an eye (or both) on.

I tried out the Mac version. The installer crapped out on 10.3.9 (the disk image didn't even pass the checksum stage). On the brand new MacBook Pro, 10.4.9, the installer worked, but (and I guess I'm not really shocked here), the Silverlight pages didn't recognize that the plug-in had been installed. Not the ideal customer experience.