beTech » Silverlight Takes on Flash/Flex and Ajax

Silverlight Takes on Flash/Flex and Ajax

Microsoft layed down the gauntlet at this week’s Mix 07 Conference with a Flash/Flex and Ajax competitor called Silverlight. This time around, the post-Gates Microsoft may have nailed it. Of course, the Microsoft faithful will love it—Silverlight provides a modern, well-designed presentation layer to leverage their .Net work.

But what’s captured the attention of the larger developer community is that Silverlight applications will work on IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari (yup, on a Mac) AND support non-MS languages. Furthermore, these apps will be delivered to the browser in Microsoft’s XAML markup language which means information within will be more accessible and findable by default than with compiled Flash/Flex apps.

What the heck is going on here? Silverlight just may be the first significant salvo from the more open, Ray Ozzie-powered Microsoft 2.0.

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.