While I am critical of Microsoft, its because I know they can do better than they have in recent years. If you put the dismal performance of Vista and the horrible marketing campaigns of late, Microsoft outside the consumer and platform sphere has created some incredibly innovative products for developers over the last few years. Linq, and WCF are just two recent examples - not to mention the new SQL server 2008 which is amazing as well - more on that in a later post...

Unfortunately, it is Microsoft business model that needs innovation - not their tools. It is mired in the world of PC software - often to the detriment of new and innovative ideas.

Fortunately, Silverlight looks like a breakthrough technology for Microsoft: mainly because it shows a change of attitude. Microsoft is finally getting serious about cross platform support, and the web as the application platform. I have often wondered why Microsoft has not made a .net VM host for other platforms - Mono aside. The obvious answer being fear of cannibalizing its windows franchise. I personally think Microsoft, if it were serious about this battle for the web, would make windows free for consumers, and instead shift its focus to a subscription service based model: say $50 a year for support for Windows or something to that effect. It would cost it a fortune initially, and would affect their stock price (could it get worse??) but would force the company to formally acknowledge what has already happened: Operating systems are a commodity.

Anyway - fantasy aside - It seems that Silverlight is at least a start at Microsoft opening its platform up to other operating systems.

Silverlight allows for .net managed code to run on any platform using Windows Presentation Framework. I am very excited about this, as many of the apps we are looking at building can then be made to run on any platform. It is of course possible to do this with Ajax, which I have done, but it will be nice to have the advantage of a full fledged debugger and a nice set of tools that finally is graphic designer friendly on the Microsoft side (Google of course has had this for a while with its GWT - I have never liked Microsoft's native implementation of asp.net Ajax - its complicated and messy).

I already have a version of a managed code graph written in C# using the open source Visifire control working in IE, Firefox, and Firefox on the mac (have to try linux next)... using the same code base. This graph gets its data from a WCF service that pulls data from our accounting system.

Here it is running in firefox on my MacBookPro:

d

Getting this working though was a bit difficult from a configuraion standpoint.