SilverLight In the Junior Leagues, Now

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A vision from a man who grew up in the Internet Age, writes computer software and develops Internet systems for a living, and has visions of the future that keep him up at insane hours of the night.

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I am an oldtime Microsoft fan. Having said that, I have some observations on SilverLight that I will comment on.

When it comes to SilverLight, the current edition (1.0) is not even platform parity with Flash MX 2004 which is the edition of Flash of which I am most familiar with. I, from both a Visual Studio developer as well as a Flash developer perspective have had difficulty getting Blend (A SilverLight development tool) to do the most basic event driven activities with SilverLight. It does tweening OK, however I'd used programs in the 90's that did that well.

One thing Microsoft keeps falling on their face with is how to get software developers and designers to work together while keeping their tasks separate. With Visual Studio .Net/2003/2005 this was supposed to happen through the separation of backend coding from the front-end html development. Unfortunately the RunAt="Server" requirement for .Net controls in web development and the server controls in general pretty much required either the designers to know the idiosyncracies of Microsoft's additions to the markup language, or for the developers to touch the designers work, potentially breaking it and preventing the separation between designers and developers development efforts. In addition, I have not yet met a designer who wishes to use Visual Studio as their design tool, even though it supports Microsoft's server controls.

I think Microsoft has missed the mark again with SilverLight. At one point they were strongly targeting designers who by training are strongly anti-Microsoft. By incorporating the .Net languages into SilverLight, I believe that Microsoft will engage a larger software developer audience, however most of those folks could not develop an aestheticly attractive application to save their souls. Microsoft needs to appeal to the "Renaissance Man" & "Renaissance Woman." Those individuals who have both aesthetic sensibilities as well as programming and development capabilities. These are a rare breed, but there is apparently such a market demographic as the targeting of Adobe's web development tools such as Flash and DreamWeaver attests.

Toward this end it would be great if Microsoft would reawaken their great vector/bitmap tool PhotoDraw with XAML support and additional behavior/scripting ability. In addition, rather than have SilverLight be a "me too" product in comparison to Flash, Microsoft should take the ballsy step of daring to make the SilverLight plug-in larger to incorporate the 3D capabilities of WPF. To support this development path, Microsoft should take their 3D modeling and rendering tool (or did they sell that off?) or buy another if need be and give that SilverLight 3D support/XAML support and downsize the tool to something that could be downloaded for free to compete with Googles SketchUp product. By tying an excellent vector/bitmap tool to SilverLight as opposed to the plain-Jane Expression Design you would gather a greater wow factor and faster uptake. In addition, adding the 3D capability along with an excellent 3D tool, you would position SilverLight at the high end of capability, which we all know becomes mainstream capability rather quickly in the computer/Internet world.

With the prevalence of broadband and the ubiquitousness of 3D capable systems, I believe this is a gamble Microsoft should take.I believe Microsoft programming tools are superior for authoring user generated code, and would rather use Visual Studio for editing compared to the Flash MX 2004 editor.

Microsoft learns quickly. Hopefully they are open to direction and are motivated to develop SilverLight into a premiere product. It may be that they already of plans of this nature, and just need time to envision, design and implement.I think the real battle between Flash and Microsoft is 2-3 years down the road. Until then, SilverLight needs to fill in the gaps and build an identity.