Silverlight Popularity and Features of Silverlight 2

I was just scanning the feeds and came across this post by Dave Bost on his blog. He’s talking about some of what happened at Mix ‘08 and what was mentioned there about Silverlight.

Scott Guthrie was…er…juggling the keynote at MIX’08 this year. You could say he was head ringmaster. As opposed to Ray Ozzie kicking MIX off with a short intro into his vision of cloud-based computing, ScottGuthrie was leading us through the majority of keynote festivities. Scott gave up the stage for a brief moment to Dean Hachamovitch, to give us all an update on IE8 and the direction it is headed in. When the stage was handed back to ScottGu, things really got rockin’. Including an announcement that the Silverlight plug-in is averaging 1.5 Million downloads per day! Not a bad start.

1.5M downloads per day isn’t bad, but I’ve talked to a number of people that are quite irritated by the strong-arm requesting downloading it on the Microsoft homepage. I’m wondering if that’s really skewing the numbers of who actually wanted it and who just got tired of getting annoyed by the prompt to download it?

Some interesting information Dave also shared in the post included some information about what we can expect from the next iteration of Silverlight when Silverlight 2 is available to the masses and out of beta.

Most of the keynote centered around the roadmap and feature list for Silverlight 2 (SL2). It was announced at MIX that Silverlight 2 Beta 1 is available for download and comes with a go-live license for early adopters. Some of the great new features of Silverlight 2 include:

• Adaptive Streaming; Silverlight can analyze the available bandwidth between client and server and adjust accordingly to provide an acceptable user experience while streaming video.
• Silverlight Advertisement Templates for Visual Studio; a project wizard to help define advertisement type, size, placement, etc.
• Rich UI Framework – CONTROLS!; Calendar, Button, Slider, CheckBox, DataGrid, etc. all with Layout management, Resize, etc.
• Multi-language support
• Data-binding support
• Rich Skinning, Style and Animation
• Robust Network support; Socket support (who doesn’t love sockets???)
• Integrated Data support; LINQ support and local data cache
• Two words – Deep Zoom

I’ve got to say, the implementation of it was pretty slick for the SXSW site that was done. If I could ever get caught up on everything else I’m trying to complete and/or learn and put in my mental tool belt, Silverlight is on the list to familiarize myself with more in the future.