To Bov,
I was not pushing Linux. I said I was open to different operating systems. But, Microsoft said this would be an open product and there was no way to run it on any reasonable operating system. That seemed to be worth a comment. I would happily pay for an OS. I don’t use Linux or BSD because they are free. There are places where a MS OS makes sense, such as game machines. But a system designed to be unreliable should not be in any mission critical business application. And Microsoft does design their current OS to be unreliable. I loved Win2K, and wish I could still recommend it. But, the security fixes are just getting too old for it now. Microsoft had to really work to push me away, but they succeeded.

My original post was on the subject of the talk. This response does not say much about Silverlight, but merely answers questions I was asked. It will be interesting to me to see if it gets posted.

This is the CLR runing in the browser mate. Thats like building a web application with all the power of a fat client available to you – err… on the client, in the browser, over there on the user’s computer. This is a web content delivery revolution – you snooze you loose.

No software is free, and if you actually manage to find some that is, the people that developed are just plain stupid. Linux is not free – its costs way too much to maintain because of the cost of the geeks that maintain it. I’ve been runing a web enterprise development company for the last 3 years and my biggest clients are the ones migrating from linux to MS, because of the money they have had to spend on fruitless geek crap, and because the .Net framework gives them a toolset which is by order of magnitudes more productive than any other. These are people that are willing to chuck out non-MS investments to the cost of millions in order to save money going forward. Thats the real world spelling it out, not some geek to geek debate. Business is business, and time is money. Catch up or cop out.

We have scores of developers comfortable with developing .net client applications for the desktop, yet we also have just about every customer demanding that the application be delivered to a web browser, both for minimum touch intranet deployment, or as a managed service.

At present, the solution is to publish using Citrix until we have the time and energy to rewrite using browser techniques. Citrix has drawbacks as requiring an additional server layer at the datacentre, and is expensive in licensing.

Silverlight sounds very attractive since, if I understand this right, a relatively straightforward port of the application (already running under .net) should be possible.

I’m so tired of the open OS diatribe. That entire paragraph sounds like it could have just as easily been written by the Unabomber.

Enjoy your flash-free, purist utopia.

Some developers are excited by the concept of being able to create script based rich apps (unlike flash dev tools made for designers) that offer .NET libraries to code against. Which it seems like you will even be able to do in variations of Ruby and Python (http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=304541).