I've been in a fairly interesting discussion in email with Justin-Josef Angel. I won't get into the full content of the email for now. But we were discussing the merits of Silverlight (SL) 1.1, and I mentioned something that I have been thinking about for a bit.
I decided it's a theoretical piece of info that I want to share with the world and maybe someone will build it for me (and for all of us).
One of the things I see with SL 1.1 is that we are going to see some really interesting framework grow up around it. The one that rolls immediately off the top of my head is an MVC or MVP framework. Now I know I have been critical of the values of these for a lot of reasons that I won't go into, but I do see value in this for SL.
It could be implemented in a number of ways. For instance, you could have the controller back at the web server (possibly associated with a WebService, some kind of REST service, or even the code behind of a page... OK, maybe not the code behind), and when interactions take place in the SL it would call back to the server for direction about what to do next. I know that's not exactly pure MVC, but it would be darn close.
I could also see where the controller is actually a class in the SL app, so the WebService becomes just the data layer to the SL app.
The real point is with even the baby CLR we are getting with SL 1.1, all this stuff should be possible. The major benefit is that maybe we can escape the leaky abstraction that Ayende wrote about (remember I'm not a TDD guy, but I might become a BDD guy... but that's another story).