Silverlight and Microsoft Expression - Designers and Developers can now work together

Silverlight was unveiled at Mix07 yesterday. It is truly amazing. Words can't do it justice, but Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch does a great job. You have to see it in action to understand just how good it is. Dan Farber at ZDnet has a great post on the business strategy side of the Silverlight platform and tools. There are more stories at TechMeme. Silverlight is available for download at Silverlight.Net.

There is a LOT to digest, both technical features and business strategies. Microsoft is very serious about delivering great tools for designers and developers on both the PC and Mac, and for Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers. It is difficult to boil this down to a few paragraphs but here is what jumps out for me.

Designers and Developers can work together and use the same tools. Microsoft Expression tools for web designers, Visual Studio for web developers, and Silverlight for cross web browser and cross platform support. The combination of great tools for building applications and Silverlight for cross platform distribution creates real synergy for developers, web site owners, and users.

Developers can use their language of choice. With Silverlight you can code in C#, Javascript, Visual Basic, Python and Ruby. And because the the CLR (Common Language Runtime) the code can be deployed on the desktop or on the web across platforms.

Silverlight Streaming - hosting and streaming for FREE. Silverlight Streaming allows users to host their Silverlight content and apps on Microsoft servers, taking advantage of the global data centers and content delivery network. Currently in alpha, it supports up to 4GB of content, and allows streaming up to 1 million minutes of on-line video delivery at  DVD quality.

I talked to several Flash developers and asked them if they could do all the stuff we saw in the Silverlight demos. The short answer is no, not within one tool suite, and some things not at all. Microsoft Expression tools bring designers and developers together and provide everything they need in one tool suite. Silverlight provides the runtime environment across platforms to make it all happen with high quality and high performance. It is a great product and service that will get even better over time, but it will take time to win over the Flash developer community. Once they try it out and see it in action I think the benefits will be obvious. Let the fun begin!

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Comments

[Juha]

Developers, Designers
Developers, Designers
Developers, Designers
Developers, Designers

Who told you to stop reading this comment?
(With apologies to S. Ballmer.)

[Michael]

For a great example of developers and designers working together in WPF and Silverlight, also take a look at http://www.thirteen23.com. Granted, Adobe is also in town with AIR, but it's clear both of these technologies promise to empower designers in the application space.