Silverlight 2.0 - Savior of the Internet or latest fad?

Recently I had the opportunity to build a control for SnagAJob.com in Silverlight 2.0. My first impression is...Wow!... This is going to change a lot of things.

I think it is important to mention that I am coming to Silverlight development late. I never played with the 1.0 or 1.1 releases. I never had to go through the early pains of discovery associated with the technology. (ahh...remember the early days of the AJAX Toolkit). First off, I want to give a big "hats-off" to the team over at Silverlight.Net. If you have not been to the site, you are definitely missing out. The Getting Started section is the perfect place to well.... get started. They also have a fabulous set of video tutorials and gallery samples (many with code) to get you up and running on Silverlight.

If you are new to Silverlight, developing in Silverlight 2.0 with managed code is very intuitive, especially if you have any prior experience with Windows Forms development. An easy way to think about the design paradigm is that of a Windows Form application running in the browser. BUT... it is so much more... It is Flash like in nature in that it runs as an embedded control in your page. You simply have to install the Silverlight runtime. Hopefully Microsoft will begin pushing out the runtime as part of it's Windows Update.

Could Silverlight be the death of AJAX? Silverlight is based upon a subset of WPF. The ability to develop web content using XAML will truly open up the Internet to a host of creative and visually stunning applications. The problem I see with AJAX is that it still requires the mixing of technologies. (HTML, JavaScript, Services). While Silverlight 2.0 doesn't completely eliminate the technology mash-up, I believe the unified development environment (XAML, Managed Code)that Silverlight 2.0 provides will super charge the development of visually attractive and highly interactive user experiences.

Could Silverlight be the death of ClickOnce? In some circumstances it might. It provides the end-user experience required by many applications that are currently written as Windows Forms applications and it's deployment scenario is possibly simpler than that of ClickOnce. To deploy a Silverlight application, you only need to copy the latest-n-greatest bundled version of your control (.xap file) up to your web server. Silverlight is cross-browser compliant, so the headaches of ClickOnce deployment for end-users running Firefox is avoided.

Silverlight is obviously not a silver-bullet. There are plenty of short comings that will need to be overcome, but I believe there are good things in store for this technology.

My friend and colleague Kevin Hazzard has been doing some great presentations and code camps lately on Silverlight. Check out his GotNet blog for some great reading.