Comment: Silverlight 2 makes waves at MIX08

Posted on 7 Mar 2008 at 10:16

The main focus at MIX08 in Vegas is undoubtedly Silverlight 2, Microsoft's Flash killer and more. And there are several new developments that might lure developers and users alike.

The Silverlight viewer app no longer needs the .NET Framework to run and is also available for OS X on the Mac.

And on the mobile front, Nokia has just announced it will be embedding Silverlight on many of its phones.

So is it any good? Well, there have been lots of demos here showing off Silverlight's new capabilities and one that particularly interested me was its ability to adjust the content automatically depending on both the connection speed and the usage of the local CPU.

Hard Rock showed a feature called Deep Zoom, where they were viewing a 2-billion pixel image via a browser - all impressive stuff and food for thought about your future web applications.

One big worry I have is that there has been no mention nor any breakouts on the accessibility features of Silverlight, and I shall be asking some more awkward questions later.

A big vision Microsoft has is the ability for designers and developers to be able to work simultaneously and there's a lot of talk here about whether this is possible.

I've been talking to several of the attendees and the view is that this nirvana is a long way off, and the majority experience is that this form of collaboration is only possible with other people being employed to oversee the two areas. So we're still on first base. See, I'm even starting to pick up the lingo!