Tuesday, May 8, 2007

End of ASP.NET?

I just watched Scott Guthrie's Silverlight 1.1 screencast. It's very promising. It looks like they have everything to make the technology work and now they need to get everybody to take it seriously. I don't think they'll have a hard time with developers; it was a big hit at MIX '07. The harder part will be convincing people to install the plug-in or designers to learn Expression Blend.

Assuming it gains critical mass, will anyone continue to make regular ASP.NET HTML-based pages? Silverlight-based pages look better and are easier to develop. Javascript is a fun language but it's dynamically typed, embedded in the page instead of on the server and can't leverage existing .NET libraries. Not having to deal with cross-browser HTML quirks may be worth it.

I'm hoping Silverlight catches on.

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