My Headlines

Saturday, May 5, 2007

The Real Excitement at Mix 07

by Don Burnett

The really exciting thing about Mix 07 that I think will really make a difference, isn't the video from Silverlight but Microsoft's integration of their CLR (Common Language Runtime) into the Silverlight plug-in itself for the Mac and PC. If you read Ryan Stewart's blog you will also see that Silverlight is coming to Linux's Mono project as well.

Scott Hanselman has just posted a new diagram about how this all fits together.. Here it is courtesy of his blog..

This is incredible news, because the news is very far reaching. This for all intent ande purposes means you aren't stuck making apps in Javascript any more and you can program applications in either compiled or dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, C# and VB and a number of other .Net lanugages that might come along (PHP anyone?). Finally, strongly typed data has come to the web.

The implications of all of this is code that executes hundreds of times faster than browser based scripting. If you wanted runtime code you were stuck with Java with all of it's UI and performance limitations. You didn't have a great graphics subsystem to work with either that offers declaritive mark-up. It also means you can include user created custom controls. If you want more information on the ones already listed see Mike Harsh's Blog.

The implications of the CLR running on the Mac and being able to DEBUG the application on the Mac using Safari are pretty wild too..

Anyway, the web just got a whole lot better for all of us..

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