So I was preparing to do my Ajax demos (which I need to get online) for the Day Of Ajax during Mix, when the Silverlight announcement hit.  I had been monitoring WPF/e and had noted that it had the potential to be my next platform. 

Anyway, Healy and Zimmerman, both went nuts over it, so I took some time to assess it.  After a quick search of the docs I discovered that there were no form controls for it.  In other words, it was a way to create a nice looking UI (like Flash) but there were no controls for me to drop on a form and collect data from the user.  To me the business use of this was zero (zilch... nada). 

So instead of embarrassing myself here on this blog, I sent the email back to Zimmerman and to Healy (and since Healy is a Dev Evangelist and Zimmerman is an MVP... maybe I missed something).  I simply asked them where the controls were.

Zimmerman responded almost immediately... check out the Blend 2 beta... it has controls.  So after several hours playing with Blend 2, I discovered that low and behold... there are no form controls in Silverlight.  Healy confirmed this as well... the first version is really a lot like Flash, but the 1.1 will have a CLR (and right now it has no form controls).

So I thought "well, I need to keep my finger on this one, but seriously, I'm unimpressed right now."  As you may be able to guess the name of this post is "My Silverlight conversion" and there was something that happened about a month later that changed everything.  I signed up to watch a WebCast on Silverlight given by Public Sector DevEvangelist. 

I admit I lightly watched the webcast... it was on my desktop which has become my "other" machine.  When I heard the words, "now we're going to talk to the browser's DOM directly from Silverlight replacing JavaScript with C#" I was all ears.

Let me repeat that for those that glossed over and missed it (and in bigger font).

I heard the words

"Now we're going to talk to the browser's DOM directly from Silverlight replacing JavaScript with C#. (And then debug it from Visual Studio!)"

My reaction was "Holy crap!"  I immediately (while watching the demo) fired off an email to Healy and Zimmerman... it was something to the effect that Ajax was dead... long live Silverlight!"  I even posted a question asking when 1.1 was going to ship...

Healy made me stay focused on MS Ajax for another month... I would have posted last week, but I was on site at a new client (in Ohio...) 

So now I can say what I've wanted to say for over a month.

This is HUUUUGGGGEEEEE!!!!!

Basically we can write C# code into an invisible Silverlight applet and we now can eliminate gobs of Javascript code by using C#/Ruby/VBx/Python/etc. (in the Silverlight applet's "codebehind") instead.  On top of that, this effectively eliminates compatibility issues because your code is running in the applet which only offers methods that are available within Silverlight and the plugin is what does the translation... no more FireFox issues... no more Safari issues.. no more Opera issues... no more Konqueror issues... no more Lynx... uhh... ok, maybe not Lynx, but you get the idea.

I'm done.  I can't wait until this ships, and then all JavaScript goes away (ok, maybe not ALL jJavaScript, but a large portion of it).