Silverlight Comes To Light

The buzz surrounding the imminent brawl between heavyweights Microsoft and Adobe in the ring of rich internet applications seems akin to the publicity for pay-per-view boxing matches of yore. In this corner we have Adobe, who Sunday announced their own media platform and with the ubiquity of Flash is working with their new “Apollo” runtime and Flex to further solidify their format dominance in web video. In this corner we have Microsoft, last night announcing Silverlight, their own cross-browser web client runtime, along with its own development platform for Vista.

Silverlight, previously named WPF/E, or Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere, is a cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in that has more than once been been referred to as a Flash killer. Silverlight promises a variety of tasty features, including support for full-screen HD video and mobile scenarios.

More details on Silverlight and hopefully WPF will be unveiled at Microsoft’s own MIX07 Conference at the end of the month.  All of these recent announcements have raised many questions and as betas are released in the coming months the first real punches of this battle will commence. But why do we think developers are the ones who are going to feel the body blows?