So I took this quiz and I disagree with the results but its kind of cool. I think that some of the questions like 'Have I said something that made some one cry' and I answered 'Yes and they deserved it' need to be understood in context... lol
I AM 84% MEGATRON
Take the Transformers Quiz
My point in bring this up is that Silverlight is a great tool for doing web developement but like anything we need to use it carefully. Silverlight for example can be used to create things like this that provide a rich interactive experience that is a draw for users. Great for marketing. I just hope people understand that not everything like this is the 'gospel' true or thought out by a shrink... :)
Also here is a cool link on Silverlight preformance vs other bits that some one sent out. It is particularly interesting to see perf between 1.0 and 1.1 Silverlight. Silverlight 1.1 when it is finally released will have a lot of capability to do processing much faster then say JavaScript. So the example I talked with some one at MS about recently was the chess model where the intellecency or 'chess' algorythm was implemented in Silverlight vs JavaScript and it make the client side game 'much' faster. Note that I have had trouble with this link (as in it only works for me some times...) http://bubblemark.com/
Also in comparing Silverlight vs. Flash Jared came up with some interesting points in a recent email thread running around the company:
· Silverlight has much more robust way of communicating with the DOM. Finding external HTML objects, JavaScript functions and communicating with them feels completely natural.· Silverlight 1.1 supports DRM where flash video does not. Nokia and other mobile carriers have just signed off on Microsoft’s PlayReady technology.· It also uses the standard VC-1 codec, the we are beginning to see on HD DVD and Blue Ray disks· XAML is hot (I personally think markup design has huge potential on the web and with blogger. “Throw some funny colors, shapes and text on my blog.. no problem. I’ll write it”)
· Video Brush
· I also think the DLR has a lot of potential. It currently supports four dynamic languages built on top: Python, JavaScript (ECMAScript 3.0), Visual Basic and Ruby. But allows anyone to write their own parser.
(from Jared)
And some other points on the thread included:
1. Silverlight uses XAML so working with Vectors is more “open” than flash… This is hugely beneficial… Howerver Flash tooling for vectors is more robust at the moment… Some benefits that Silverlight has is Gradients on stroke… Otherwise silverlight vector features is pretty comparable to SVG which is pretty comparable to flash. Render wise… WPF is better than Flash (at least I think so). I know Silverlight has different rendering engine than WPF though and I don’t think we get sub pixel rendering benefits of WPF… But hopefully some of our knowledge from WPF MIL is in Silverlight. 2. Both Silverlight and Flash have preloader solutions… Both of these have been mostly roll your own… But both offer APIs that are useful. My bet is Flash has more years of experience here so its better… But I don’t think anything would be a deal breaker. More variance in existing community solutions for Flash… More openess for Silverlight.
Silverlight’s WMV media support is better and WMV is a better codec than the On2 codec for Flash (personal opinion) but ...
Silverlight allows you to do .net in 1.1 which is blazingly faster than JS and AS…
(quoted from Nathan)
Anyway so I think that these guys have some good solid info on this thread that everyone would find useful.