So the big news is that Silverlight 2 has been released, I haven’t really paid much attention to Silverlight up until the Devsta competition which gave me the incentive to jump right in and start developing with it.
I remember on the first day of development of Console Connect I was really frustrated that I couldn’t get the exact layout of UI elements that I wanted, I hadn’t fully understood the power of the StackPanel. Once I got over that hurdle I found myself applying the same text styles to numerous textboxes which didn’t feel right, then I discovered the shared resources, by now the light was on and I was lovin it.
I was really impressed by how easy it was to pick up, I don’t recall having any problems at the code level, just the UI issues I previously mentioned. Within a week I had a couple of small games working and could do all the same things that I could in a winforms app like calling webservices and changing the UI in response to the users input. If I was a little more graphically inclined, my games could come to life with animations and sounds, but that is best left to those right side of the brain people.
One of my colleagues said to me that he didn’t think that Silverlight would get much widespread adoption, but my thoughts after having a good play with the technology are a little different.
I think the key is the shallow learning curve for .NET developers, something like this:
Once you get over the little UI hump (which is basically the same for WPF) and learn a handful of things like data binding, resources and the way the UI can use panels, your just about at the top of the curve. I think Scott Hanselman had much of the same experience when started on his babysmash experiment.
So ultimately I think the success of Silverlight will be around the fact that developers can pick it up quickly and experience all that developer love from Microsoft. All the things that make development a breeze like a full debugger, intelli-sense and a framework that is familiar.
Or maybe I’m completely wrong and the rest of the world will have the same view as Ruby On Rail’s David Heinemeier Hansson who basically thinks that we are only scratching the surface with what can be done with Javascript and HTML, maybe rich internet applications will be a passing fad?