Microsoft is ramping up it’s push for Silverlight all the time. The new Microsoft Download Beta site, written with Silverlight, is an attempt to show off what it can do (it’s also a good way to get Silverlight installed on users machines!). Microsoft has the push at the moment of getting designers and developers to collaborate and have two great tools to do that, with Expression Blend (& Blend 2.5) for designers and VS2008 for developers. Realistically though, the designer and the developer are the same person in the majority of cases, at least for the initial phases of a project.
It’s a thought I’ve had for a while now. In the same way that the free Express versions of Visual Studio target the hobbyist developer, the same needs to be done with Blend. If you get the hobbyists onto Silverlight, you’ll start to see it everywhere! Hence, Blend Express!
To get Silverlight more competitive with Flash it’s going to take developer (not designer) acceptance. Silverlight is all about the UI, but it’s just hard work to do that at the moment!
I agree. My boss and I were looking at building a tool that we have in asp.net 1.1 in silverlight, but we don’t have a blend license. It makes it hard to build it “slick” enough to sell the C-level execs on the development resource investment without blend. But we can’t get funding to buy blend without the rest of the story.
By: Brian on July 28, 2008
at 7:08 pm