What is Silverlight, and to what types of developers would it be beneficial to know and learn?

Question

Is Silverlight just basically Microsoft's version of Adobe Flash? If so, I've read over the years that Flash is very SEO unfriendly (SE bots see it as a blank page, I've been told), and some browsers don't like Flash too much. Are the same things true for Silverlight?

I just have a company website I made in Visual Studio 2010 / vb / asp.net 4.0.

Do you have to be an experienced programmer to work with Silverlight, or is there a nice GUI to help out newbies? I'm just trying to find out, now that I've downloaded 5.0, if the value of learning it is worth it. Thanks!

Answer 1

Silverlight is a lot of things, in summary you could say that it's a light-weight .NET run-time, a subset of WPF and a capable video player.

Silverlight brings XAML to the web, yes, but more importantly it appears that it's becoming more and more a framework for deploying rich business applications over the web, but not through the browser.

Some would probably argue that Silverlight (along with Flash) is dead, and that the HTML5 is the way forward. That might be true, under certain circumstances but Silverlight has a lot of cool data binding tricks as well as a very capable retained mode render which is very suitable for business GUIs.

I would argue that the choice wheter to invest in Silverlight as a technology or not is a question you should ask yourself, basically what's your reach? e.g. I would not develop Facebook using Silverlight because Facebook has to be everywhere. If you wanna go social, then the web is ubiquitous. But if you have a customer base that acknowledge Microsoft, and already run Windows everywhere, the kind of headway you can make with Silverlight is quite astonishing.

I urge you to look at some Silverlight demos to gain a better feel for what Silverlight has to offer. Then to build great Silverlight applications you need to invest time in learning, things like XAML and MVVM (using a lot of data binding).