Today Microsoft announced that WPF/E will be named Silverlight in the future. Honestly Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere is much cooler as a name, not that it really matters.
I think Silverlight actually will be a strong competitor to Adobe Flash. It has some neater features unlike Flash, like native 3D support most of the WPF features that's come with XAML. Another strong reason is that Microsoft will push really hard on this, it would be kind of embarrassing for them to release another failure like ActiveX.
The tools for designing Silverlight aswell as regular WPF is young and not as complete as Adobes Flash environment (Expression Designer is still in beta I think) so they have a bit more miles to run on that area.
Flash does not have a separate design / logic design, unlike Silverlight where you have your design in the XAML and your logic in separate (liiiight) CLR syntax. I think most interaction logic will be done with Microsoft AJAX and custom JavaScript as well as C# / VB.net. Flash has a weak form of C++ called ActionScript that's not even OO. However what's important in this context is that C# / VB.net should be used only for interaction logic, not business logic that you should have in a remote webservice or WCF. But for smaller apps I hope that the developer can produce some more complex logic and data access from within Silverlight.
Blogs about Silverlight:
Joe Stegman's WebBlog http://blogs.msdn.com/jstegman/
Mike Harsh's Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh/
Sean Alexander's Blog http://www.seanalexander.com/
Somasegar's WebLog http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/
Laurence Moroney's Blog Web.Next http://blogs.msdn.com/webnext/
Tim Sneath's Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/tims
Dave L. Campbell's Blog http://www.wynapse.com/
Compiled from Michael Schwartz blog (just a comment on him…the guy is a fricken genious…german…but still genious :P)
posted @ Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:25 PM