[PLUG-Devel] Questions about Silverlight/Moonlight?

['josh coffman']

>---- Original Message ----
>From:Ted Gould <ted at gould.cx>
>To:"List for Linux development and software engineering discussions." 	<plug-devel at lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us>
>Subject:Re: [PLUG-Devel] Questions about Silverlight/Moonlight?
>Date:Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:15:59 -0700
>--------------------


>On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 12:52 -0700, Alan Dayley wrote:
>> The local Microsoft developer tools evangelist (nice guy, really)
>> contacted me about the announcement of Silverlight 1.0 and full support
>> for the Mono based port to Linux called Moonlight.  He offered to answer
>> aggregated questions from this group.
>
>Okay,  I'll shoot.
>
>-- If I Moonlight exists, what's the point of Silverlight?  No,
>seriously.  Mono runs on Win32, Moonlight will likely run on Win32, I
>really don't see why anyone would want to run the close source version
>of something that is 100% compatible with the open source version (which
>MS has said Moonlight will be).

Or if Mono exists, what's the point of .Net... Most [windows] people don't care about open source or closed source, they just want it to work. Why would a windows user want to have to install mono in order to view a silverlight website, when they can just installed the silverlight plugin as easy as they would the flash plugin. And if it wasn't that easy, then Silverlight would be dead in the water.

>
>-- As the web becomes mobile, why should I care about this?  It seems
>like another canvas widget, but without the general support.  Why is MS
>reimplementing canvas (with some improvements, I admit) when extending
>it is probably easier and more likely to get into distribution faster?
>It seems like with SVG and Canvas I already have everything in
>Silverlight... (minus video, but browsers can already do that)

Richer media on the web. One thing that MS does well, in my opinion, is empower and promote their development platform. I'm not a Flash guy, but I am very good with .Net. Silverlight gives me the ability to do richer media with very little time into new skills. Mono & moonlight gives me the option of doing it w/o the MS stack.

>
>-- I'm confused on the vector graphics support.  Is that through XAML?
>I guess I never really saw that as a graphics format, so I'm a touch
>confused.
>
>-- "Downloadable binary CODEC" -- please explain to me why this isn't
>the security flaw that ActiveX was.  Especially considering all the
>Intel processor errors that the OpenBSD guys have found.  Are we going
>to need install an "x86 ISA lint" into our firewalls to protect users?
>
>That's my confusion for now :)  Alan, would it be possible for him to
>just join the list an reply.  I always prefer discussion :)


Alan, email me off list and let me know who it is. I can probably arrange a discussion format on this topic.


>
>		--Ted
>
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