Tim Sneath posted a blog entry titled “From A to Z… 50 Silverlight Applications ” Now I am really excited about Silverlight, but with the customers that I have to support I have to be realistic when it comes to developing solutions. Microsoft has stated that Silverlight 1.0 will be released this summer. For those of you new to Microsoft product development that means it will be released probably in October or November. I figure if I have a web application that needs to go live in December or maybe late November I’m pretty safe suggesting Silverlight version 1.0 as an alternative to Flash.
During Mix 07 I pointed out that they also released an “alpha” build of Silverlight 1.1 and all the really cool features were in that. Nobody with a Microsoft business card would even guesstimate when version 1.1 will be released (even after multiple shots at the friendly neighborhood bar). However, it seems that with all the ease of development built into version 1.1 nobody was paying attention to version 1.0.
Anyway, back to Tim’s post today. He posted links to 50 Silverlight applications (which most are really technology previews than applications, but let’s not dwindle on that). I went through and tried my best to find out what people are using. I was surprised to find that of the 50, 18 of them were written in version 1.0. Good job to those of you who wrote your demo in version 1.0. I’m proud of you. 5 of them I either didn’t want to install (executable Silverlight? Why not just stick with WPF) or they required a login. One didn’t work, and one was actually a duplicate from the version 1.0 pile. That left 24 that were written in version 1.1.
Now I understand the power that Silverlight 1.1 contains, but lets be honest, it’s still an alpha build. Come on everyone, let’s get the documentation and examples around version 1.0 up to the point that Microsoft is willing to say “We will release version 1.1 in April of next year.” That way you’ll know that sometime around September of next year you can start demonstrating your great Silverlight 1.1 applications to a released product.
