Having played with Flash over the years and seen it become a defacto standard on the web, it was with some interest that I read about Microsoft’s Flash rival, Silverlight. My only complaint about developing Flash apps is having to buy expensive software from Adobe in order to do so. Microsoft has generally excelled at making it easy to develop for the platforms they support. Silverlight is slated to run on Windows PC or Mac in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. This is pretty broad support for Microsoft, so maybe they’re serious about mounting a challenge to Flash after all. And their plan to support Silverlight development in a variety of languages, including Javascript definitely intrigues me. I think that unless Adobe significantly lowers the barrier to Flash development, they’re going to watch kids and cheapskates like me flood the web with Silverlight applications.
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