Yesterday we released the final version of Silverlight 1.0. Having had a front-row seat and emotional investment since the earliest days, it is awesome to see the team ship! Tim calls it the start of what will "undoubtedly be a long journey", but what a start it is! Tim shares some exclusive "secret" information about our release schedule, so you'll want to read his post.
There are three common questions that crop up with the 1.0 release. I'll try to answer all three here.
1. Is Anyone Really Installing Silverlight? (i.e. Why Should I Care?)
Tim covers this neatly. The Silverlight installer is small, fast, automatic, and required by a lot of popular sites that touch millions of users. For example, Microsoft sites like Halo 3 videos and the MSN Election 08 site; and MLB and Entertainment Tonight. Chad Brown, VP at IdentityMine, talks about the Emmys' use of Silverlight.
2. Is it really cross-platform?
We ship Windows and Mac versions, but what about Linux? Miguel de Icaza announces a partnership between Microsoft and Novell to provide Silverlight on Linux, with all the nattering details covered in his post. Something many people miss is that they have been aiming for Silverlight 1.1 support from the beginning, and they made phenomenal progress in just 21 days. In many ways, Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 are actually more manageable subsets of what they were already working on, so they were amply prepared to deliver a great implementation. Josh Holmes has a pretty accurate narrative of what went down in the hallways at MIX07. Not only does Silverlight have a Linux story; we have a partner that's already ahead of the curve with support for the richness of Silverlight 1.1.
3. Shouldn't I Wait For Silverlight 1.1?
I've had a few designers ask me if they should invest in learning 1.0, since 1.1 is on the way. Silverlight 1.0 requires you to do most of your code in JavaScript, while 1.1 lets you jettison JavaScript and use C# (or Ruby or Python) for practically everything. At first blush, it feels like investment in JavaScript for 1.0 is "throwaway" work. The comments thread on Jesse Liberty's blog represents some common sentiments. But I think you'll find that investment in 1.0 is mandatory and valuable. For starters, JavaScript is not going away. AJAX is here to stay, and Microsoft is investing heavily to make life easier for standards-oriented JavaScript developers. Any skills you build in JavaScript for Silverlight 1.0 will serve you well when Silverlight 1.1 ships. Additionally, there are scores of popular sites which already support 1.0, and this will only increase. And ultimately, the improvements in 1.1 are purely additive -- you'll be able to build more powerful control libraries, depend more on C#, Python, and Ruby; but you won't necessarily want to abandon JavaScript for the 1.0 use cases. Even for complex scenarios like data-binding, the 1.0 techniques which depend on JavaScript have some advantages, so you'll want to be well-versed in the options.
