Silverlight 2 At Last
Posted by jheyse on October 14th, 2008
After what seems like forever, Microsoft has released the final bits for Silverlight 2. The product has come an extremely long way since it’s code name of WPF/E and its formal introduction as Silverlight 1.1 during Mix 07. I am ecstatic about the concept of Silverlight and the RIA potential it brings developers. While my professional development roots started with the web, I’ve always felt that HTML & Javascript based applications have always been a kludge. The stateless, scripted environment built on what started as a linkable document format quickly outgrew it’s original architecture.
Silverlight 2 brings us that green field development experience all developers dream of. The "I could do this so much better only if I didn’t have to worry about …" feeling we all get when digging into an existing code base. Now that Microsoft has released the technology it is up to us, the developer community, to start creating best practices around developing on this new technology. It is looking to be an excellent next year for Rich Internet Application space.
Tim Heuer has an excellent blog post on what you need to get started with Silverlight 2 development. On a very interesting side note, Eclipse will have support for Silverlight 2… cross browser, cross platform and cross IDE.
