Silverlight 2.0 .. Is it worth it?
After watching the live webcast from mix08 , i promptly downloaded the new silverlight 2.0 extensions for visual studio 08 and started to play around with them. Well i know its still in beta , but like the great Doug Mccune said, i have yet to see something done in silverlight that cant be done in Flex/Flash. Sure theres that cool kick-ass 3D thing, but thinking from a normal client/customer point of view unless there looking into building a 3D interface (which ALSO can be done in Flex ..Papervision anyone?), they rather put their resources on something that has been in the wild for a long time and has matured properly. The big problem with silverlight is that its being called the "Flash Killer" , the way I see it Silverlight is just that , a Silver light given off by a Flash that will fade away quickly.
Silverlight which was called WPF/E which stood for Windows Presentation Foundation "everywhere" is just a waste of resources on Microsofts end. Instead of developing a plug-in to run WPF "everywhere" , they should just port over the .net 3.5 framework over to the Mac and Linux and developers can easily put there current WPF windows form applications on the web .
So is it worth learning, spending time and developing applications? . For now just download it and tinker with it, dont spend too much time trying to learn the inside outs. If you know C# then your half way there. Stick to the flash platform for now , and think about silverlight in 2026 :D