Ah, ok. You are right, it could be somewhat useful for internal apps. Especially the hackish ones that use some crazy ActiveX hacks.

[quote post=”2326″]That is where the trap is. It will be improvement in usability for you, because you are running Vista.[/quote]

I’m saying that Silverlight will be used primarily on internal (as in not shared with the public) applications, the users of theses apps would be using the computer and OS provided by their employer. Aside from Microsoft, I can’t see popular external (public) facing sites making use of Silverlight because it’s not portable, and conventional web applications will be faster.

[quote post=”2326″]If Silverlight can fix it’s accessibility short comings, then it will be adopted for internal applications by the government, libraries and educational institutions. This could be an improvement from many of the hideous internal Java / VB 6 applications within these organizations.[/quote]

Ah, but that’s exactly what I fear. That is where the trap is. It will be improvement in usability for you, because you are running Vista. It will be a step back for me – or even a hurdle that I will have to jump over because I’m running Ubuntu.

If Silverlight is adopted by goverment and educational institutions I may likely need to start a virtual machine with an instance of Windows XP in it, just so that I can fill out some important form.

Silverlight takes Windows desktop programming to the web browser through a clever browser plug-in. It will be popular with the Windows Desktop Developer crowed (the ones clueless to web development), and the ASP.NET crowd (the ones that haven’t figured out ASP.NET uses angle brackets). If Silverlight can fix it’s accessibility short comings, then it will be adopted for internal applications by the government, libraries and educational institutions. This could be an improvement from many of the hideous internal Java / VB 6 applications within these organizations. I don’t think we’ll see Silverlight used in any large fantastic, innovative applications targeted at the masses – we’ll never see a successful Facebook like app in Silverlight. Because, it is a framework, and frameworks are typically behind the wave in terms of new technology, innovation, and performance. Silverlight sits on top of all the existing browser technologies, so for a web developer that’s intimate with the browser, it doesn’t offer much – if it could offer compiled JavaScript then there might be something to look at.