Learning Silverlight
I’m in a “beta” training course for Silverlight at MS today. I have been learning how to work with the Expression applications to create Silverlight applications. It so far has been very interesting. The part that I’ve been finding helpful is that it really is different from Flash. It’s much less of a Flash competitor and more of a replacement for writing a bunch of custom Active X apps. I think the integration of .NET as a shared development environment is what makes it very powerful. It seems like there is a much more clearly defined separation between the designer and the developer compared to Flash or other tools. I will have to learn more about WPF next, since it is much more advanced in its capabilities.
Silverlight does seem to be more developer focused then designer focused for now, but at the same time could be very helpful as a way to bridge the gap between designers and developers. The design tools have a long way to go. The adoption of Silverlight by the design audience will improve once standard third party design tools start supporting XAML exporting.
I will have to post more about Silverlight soon. I have a few ideas for some custom applications that I want to start playing around thing.
