Today was the first full day at Mix 07. It started this morning at 9:30 with a keynote address from Ray Ozzie who said this about following in Bill Gate’s shadow, “There will never be another Bill Gates.” Ray also gave the high level vision of what Silverlight really is. It isn’t a Flash competitor, even though it will compete in that space. It’s really the third wheel assisting apps that cannot decide if they are desktop applications or web applications.
Scott Guthrie came out and gave demo after demo of how this can be used. The demos were for companies such as CBS, MLB, and Netflix. You can see those parts of the keynote on the Mix07 site (visitmix.com ).
One of the features that Scott made everyone excited about was the fact that Silverlight will include a .NET Framework to run on the client side. This is a cross browser, cross platform runtime that will run on the Mac. He then proceeded to do a demonstration of debugging client code running on a Mac from a PC. He went to the immediate window and changed the text that appeared on the Mac’s browser. It was wicked cool.
I know, I’m as shocked as you that I wrote “Wicked Cool” but please bear with me I’m building up to something.
The demo’s that he and the other speakers presented showed that Silverlight has the capability to be more than just flash. The demo called “Top Banana” which was a video mixing station in a browser was reported to weigh in at less than 50KB sent to the browser for the application (not counting the videos). Simply amazing…
but…
then it happened…
The version of Silverlight that they were showing off is the next version. I know what you are thinking because I was thinking it too. How can they have a next version when the current version isn’t even released? All the cool stuff for Silverlight that goes above and beyond just being a Flash competitor is in version 1.1. Which they have released the Alpha of today. Version 1.0 is in beta, but it has a go-live license. Because of that, you will see some demo’s on here for Silverlight. Hopefully soon.
