Microsoft Silverlight is, from the consumer's point of view Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash. It enables very pretty, very rich user experiences on websites, effectively letting web applications have the power and sophistication usually reserved for the thick clients.

Flash is well established in the web world so to some extent Microsoft are playing catchup with silverlight. I'm talking about Silverlight 1.1 / 2.0 here - the one we (developers) were all waiting for. Silverlight 1.0 was basically a technology preview that had as much in common with Silverlight 2 as Javascript has with Java.

There is one single and very simple reason why Silverlight will go places: Developer adoption. Developing in Flash requires learning a whole new toolset. Silverlight enables any C# coder to use their existing skills and development environments to create web content. No messy HTML, no javascript, no page postbacks and stateless environments. Well, mostly. Running in a browser gives you some limitations and XAML is a bit crazy at times but at least it's all within a pretty familiar conceptual framework. (If you're a developer reading this, ScottGu's blog is a good place to start)

There's some incredible technology behind it in terms of how they've managed to take the 30-odd MB .NET Framework and fit all the useful bits into a 2.5MB browser dowload. That's not the point of this post though. The question is - will Silverlight take off, or will it languish forgotten in the dusty technology archives?

A few thoughts:

1) We won't see entire applications done as huge silverlight downloads. Not in this version. A complex business app will still be better off as a thick client. Plus in it's current form (beta 2 as I'm writing this) it's still a bit rough around the edges. I'm looking forward do the day when we will be able to do that but my gut says it's a few versions away.

2) Because it's instantly accesisble to developers we'll start seeing it crop up in all sorts of places - as non-web developers realise they can create web content they'll start using it more. I can see it in internal corporate intranets.

3) The need for a supported runtime player could really hurt it. In that sense it's no worse than flash, but flash has had the time to become adopted on all the major platforms - in fact it's one of the few "essential" plugins you really need when setting up a new machine. MS need to keep up the runtime support if they want to break Adobe's grip on that space. 

If you hadn't guessed, I'm quite excited by it. Personally I'm not in love with how we do web development today - I think we've stretched a whole bunch of unsuitable technologies to breaking point in order to get where we are now. We need a new techology to take us forward and Silverlight might just be it.

The impetus has to come from developers though - I don't think users care how their experience is delivered as long as it works. So Silverlight will become another plugin you need to download in order to make things go. It'll probably become as popular as flash in time but if it was going to be the backbone of "Web 3.0" (or whatever idiot name the marketing types come up with) then pretty much everybody developing web apps now would have to stop and start again in Silverlight. Which ain't going to happen.

The final verdict: Great technology, will become adopted but won't set the world on fire. Yet.