No doubt you’ll be reading a great deal here and elsewhere about Silverlight but the question I’d like to address, or rather, start to address, is why I think this is the technology that “changes everything.”
The key is that with Silverlight you will, eventually, be able to create rich, media-intensive applications that will be delivered on virtually any browser, on any platform, with native performance, using most of the enormous WPF library,in managed space, writing in languages such as c#3 or VB9
The questions you have to ask are…
How soon do we get it all? Clearly this will be coming in pieces.
Once we get it all-whence ASP-NET?
Can developers keep up with all this??
More soon…
The question I have to ask is: If it runs on nearly any browser, in nearly any OS, and relies on both WPF and .NET, doesn't that mean that WPF and .NET have to be available on nearly any OS?
If Mono suddenly progresses years overnight, and WPF gets released as free software and gets ported to X11, maybe. But otherwise, I think the definition of "nearly any" will end up being somewhat more limited than it initially appears.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=414
Meh, maybe I should retract my previous statement. I still have grave doubts that it would ever run as well on Linux as it would on Windows.