About Me

My photo
Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Silverlight dawns

Silverlight, the plugin and surrounding technology for rich internet applications announced yesterday by Microsoft, is getting a lot of people very excited. There's a strong OS element to it, although the plugin itself isn't OS, and it supports a bunch of new languages in the Common Language Runtime (that's a good thing) including such OS faves as Python and Ruby (not PhP, I think). Nice to be able to use Visual Studio to develop these, and I presume that we'll start to see them supported in other .Net scenarios too, along with JavaScript and the regular .Net languages. By all accounts it is massively fast compared to unmanaged client-side code (JavaScript in AJAX, for example) and has a really nice interface - this is the Windows Presentation Framework (Avalon as was) in action. Now waiting for the applications to start appearing. I will be keeping an eye on this and Flex (the Adobe competitor, basically) to monitor the continuing merging of web and desktop.