Silverlight 2

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Microsoft Readies 'First Look' At Silverlight 2 > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

Quite exciting for those that have experience with .NET. I was never really a fan of flash, but a few friends of mine have big jobs because of Flex (Adobe's scripting/programming language for the Flash platform).

The only question I have is will this be competitive with Java applets? (I really hate Java. I was NOT a fan of Flash until Flex.) I sincerely doubt market penetration will be a problem. MS will probably have it loaded on everyone's Windows computers in the next few weeks.

I really hope this isn't a huge let down, granted MS's developer studios make some kickass products (unlike some of their other studios :\)

[chedabob]

The thing that is really cool about Silverlight is that it shares a lot of functionality with XNA, so you can write a game in XNA, and then port it to Silverlight with very little effort. You could effectively have a seamless game that you can play online or offline.

[E6600]

A good move from MS is they are extending the support to browsers running on GNU/Linux.

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Originally Posted by chedabob

The thing that is really cool about Silverlight is that it shares a lot of functionality with XNA, so you can write a game in XNA, and then port it to Silverlight with very little effort. You could effectively have a seamless game that you can play online or offline.

That's EXACTLY why I am so excited about it. Sites like Shockwave.com have some pretty nice games they wrote, but it's on the flash/flex platform (something I haven't really ever been into). There are not too many java applet games on the market, but the one that comes to mind is a British company who created Runescape. [Aside: Its creator is now one of the richest people in Great Britain; his name is Andrew Gower. The UK's richest young entrepreneurs: 30-11 - Telegraph ]

None of those games will ever compete with Gears, Resistance, etc (or not until they figure out how get around the fact that trying to stream in 6+ gigabytes of stuff accross a broadband service without making it unplayable) but many of them have been highly successful.

A game like Every Day Shooter would be PERFECT for the platform. I think many more games could transition in the same way, but very few people have wanted to pick up Java [it sucks, imo] or Flash. Silverlight would basically allow C++/C# [C++ is still SUPER popular, even though C# is a better language] "applets".

You are not likely to see CryEngine2 on Silverlight platform, but I could forsee a major movement towards it. (Two friends of mine BOTH have 100k+ jobs working with Flex - and I can't imagine Silverlight won't be ATLEAST as enticing at first.]