Come to the Microsoft Ottawa office on Dec 2nd 2010 @ 11:45 am ET sharp to watch the the future of Silverlight unfold.
On Dec 2nd 2010, Microsoft is running the all-day Firestarter event about Silverlight. It opens with a keynote from Scott Guthrie (Corporate VP of the Developer Division) on the Future of Silverlight and features various sessions from renowned speakers. It’s like another day of PDC just for Silverlight.
We’ll be watching and discussing the morning portion of the live event as a group. As a Microsoft MVP for Silverlight I’ll be there along with Microsoft’s Christian Beauclair to discuss the event and answer questions.
Silverlight is THE developer platform for rapidly building and deploying UI- and media-rich data-connected business and consumer applications for the web, the desktop and the phone. It’s available today. Microsoft has invested and will continue to invest in Silverlight, and in products that use it including LightSwitch, Lync, Windows InTune, the new Azure Portal, etc.
No registration is required.
Dec 2nd 2010
11:45 ET (event started at noon)
100 Queen Street (the World Exchange Plaza – with underground parking)
Suite 500 (5th floor)
Ottawa, ON
K1P 1J9
Colinizer 
I can’t agree that Silverlight is “THE” platform for UI design I’m afraid. I thought there was an announcement that MSFT has recognized HTML5 is really the way forward in this respect; IE 9 is now compliant with the W3C HTML5 draft proposals (along with Google, Firefox, Safari, webkit engines, etc).
Although Silverlight is currently being supported in WP7 of course plus, I guess, on the XBox platform, I can’t really believe that it wont eventually go the way of a lot of MSFT technologies and one day it’ll simply be classed as “legacy code” (quote from MSDN for COM after they launched .Net)…..
Ah – I said Silverlight is THE platform for the combination of all the things I said, not just UI design alone. Microsoft has said that HTML (not 5 specifically because many people will not have have ‘equal’ HTML 5 for some years) IS the thing for the broadest reach whereas Silverlight is the way to go for the richest device experience, plus Silverlight is available now. Silverlight includes things that HTML 5 does not. I am sure there will be jump ahead and catch up on both sides of this equation. For an existing .NET developer, Silverlight makes the most productive sense. It has a story for MVVM, rich data access, DRM, compiled code, rich line of business, rich media experiences and a huge base of existing developers.
I have experience in both HTML and Silverlight – being an MVP Silverlight shouldn’t fool you into thinking I’m biased. It’s just that I have found Silverlight (as have many) far more productive and it’s the richest experience on the desktop, web and phone right now. Microsoft would have to come up with some very compelling tooling to move developers across for ALL projects.
I think the problem for MSFT and Silverlight is a lack of take up or interest in non-Windows platforms. I work in the mobile industry for a large (very well known) device OEM and there is really a complete lack of interest in the Android and (of course) Apple camps. Most handset web engines these days are Webkit based which significantly support HTML5 in its current non-normative W3C state. The W3C have a set of compliance tests defined for HTML5 and one of the funny things about it is that IE9 scores amount the best – so even thought HTML5 is not going to be published anytime soon I think the web industry will make it a defacto standard long before that happens (as they did with HTML 4 previously).
I used to run a business based on Flash enabled products and I found that Macromedia’s and then Adobe’s licensing policies were truly difficult to contend with. When Silverlight came out I had of course hoped that it would do away with the need to use Flash and would become easily available on multiple platforms. Truth is, that never happened and I believe MSFT are now accepting that.
I’m also not biased one way or the other toward MSFT but I think in mobile terms WP7 must eventually support native code development or what will happen will be a bunch or cross-platform architecting tools will get put together to avoid developers having to write in Silverlight. One such initiative could the be new WAC platform which MSFT has yet to join.