In my humble opinion, Silverlight has now become interesting and is seriously worth our time to develop skills.
Silverlight 4 beta was just released during PDC and is available on Silverlight.net. It has a whole bunch of interesting features, but the cool part is that Silveright 4 has moved beyond the browser and has some really cool sandboxing and trusted scenarios that allow you to interact with the PC itself:
For trusted applications you get the following in Silveright 4:
- “Read and write files to the user’s MyDocuments, MyMusic, MyPictures and MyVideos folder (or equivalent for non-windows platforms) for example storage of media files and taking local copies of reports.
- Run other desktop programs such as Office, for example requesting Outlook to send an email, send a report to Word or data to Excel.
- COM automation enables access to devices and other system capabilities by calling into application components; for instance to access a USB security card reader.
- A new user interface for requesting application privileges access outside the standard Silverlight sandbox.
- Group policy objects allow organizations to tailor which applications may have elevated trust.
- Full keyboard support in fullscreen mode richer kiosk and media applications.
- Enhancements to networking allow cross-domain access without a security policy file.“
So hopefully you have spent the past year learning and mastering the ASP.NET MVC Framework, because Webforms is officially dead :) Now is the time to start learning Silverlight.
Learn more here.