I am on my flight back home from Las Vegas where I had the pleasure of attending MIX07 for the very first time. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it extremely useful and relevant to the technologies I employ on a day-to-day basis.

Of course, by now, you must have heard the entire buzz around Microsoft Silverlight; if you haven’t yet, then be sure to check it out here http://www.silverlight.net or http://silverlight.live.com.

The official announcement of the alpha release version 1.1 was made during the keynote speech but Microsoft’s brand-spanking new Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie. The delivery was nothing short of awesome. Microsoft had lined up a few organizations to present products they had build (in a very short time period – and as little as 3 weeks!) using the Silverlight framework, such as NetFlix, MLB.com, CBS and Metaliq.

All the demos presented were outstanding, but the one that caught my enthusiasm the most was NetFlix’s DVD on-demand media player. Take a look at it here.

First and foremost, with the use of Silverlight, NetFlix was able to stream video right to any PC, and depending on one’s broadband connection, with a quality as high as HD 780p.
I was floored, however, when it took only 3 seconds to start movie! Oh, that is not all, you can skip through the movie forward/backwards without any loading delays – you had to be there to see itwith your own eyes.
This is supposedly all the power of Silverlight and its ability to stream media as much as 14 times faster that we can today (according to Scott Guthrie).

Silverlight is Microsoft’s way of re-defining the future of the web as we know it.

Formerly known as code-name WPF/E, it is designed to bring the power of the Windows Presentation Foundation to the Web.
Even compelling is the fact that the .net Framework 3.0 (which is traditionally required for XAML to run) is not required to run Silverlight applications. Media players such as Windows Media Player are also not required. This is all by design. Microsoft’s idea behind Silverlight is to enable software developer target the widest web audience possible by means of interoperability.
In a nutshell, it is a self-contained graphics/media rendering engine that runs any browser and is scripted via JavaScript. The JavaScript, just as Ajax does, interacts with the server-side code to provide the rich and dynamic functionality.

The alpha version 1.1 runs on Safari and Firefox on Mac OS X as well as FireFox and Internet Explorer on Windows. The Opera browser compatibility is in the works and more will become supported as the product evolves.

The rich UIs of Silverlight is designed in XAML, an XML based definition of the UI. The XAML does not have to be hard-coded (like HTML for instance); it can be generated on fly by server-side code, thus giving developers the power of dynamic UI rendering. What is even more important to the doubting SEO, is that this XAML generates HTML on the client; HTML than can and will be crawled by the search engines – can you do that in Flash? J

Microsoft Expression was also launched this week and it makes up of four different products:

You can also get all of them bundled in Microsoft's Expression Studio.

Each of the products above is dedicated to a certain professional, but they are so tightly coupled that Designer and Developers can now collaborate seamlessly across their work deliverables.

For instance once a designer is done designing his or her template on Expression Design, it immediately becomes available to the developer working on Expression Web or Blend. Also, when and if a designer decides to change a template for any reason, the template is auto-magically applied without the need for the developed to change any of his or her code. This scenario is very seamless indeed as it compares to today’s methods.

The question that has not yet been answered by Microsoft is just how it intends to get the 75% of designers that currently use, and worship Adobe Photoshop?
What about the Mac? - As far as I know, Microsoft Expression is not available on that OS and not sure if it will ever be since there was no mention (that I heard of).

I am sure that some wicked Marketing campaign is yet to come from Microsoft to address this issue. I can’t wait to see how that will play out, but we certainly cannot have developers fiddle around with Expression Design, Media and Blend, can we?

Hey, you’ve seen those Mac VS PC ads right? If so, then you noticed how the PC is always the boring “calculator” device while the MAC is the “Cool” media, video editing device?
Well, it seems that is all about to change. Silverlight is, based on my interpretation of Ray Ozzie’s rhetoric, Microsoft’s direct response to those ads– Take that MAC! Windows is boring AND now cool too!

To get the 1.1 Alpha runtimes go to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/downloads

Developers should download the following tools:

Designers should explore these tools:

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