[PLUG-Devel] Technical side of Silverlight/Moonlight

['josh coffman']

Hi, let's have a thread on the technical side of silverlight/moonlight...

I thought it might be nice to recap a little. First, Silverlight is a client side technology (like AJAX), meant for delivery a richer user experience and richer content. sorta like flash. Silverlight requires a small runtime on the client machine. Moonlight is the port of that client side runtime to mono, which will enable silverlight to work on any platform supported by mono.

Silverlight runtime is .Net based and therefore limited to Windows. (There's a Mac runtime also, right Tim?)

Someone asked what's the point of Silverlight if we have Moonlight. To me, the question seemed backwards, and I was hoping for further discussion. But anyway, Silverlight is the original idea and implementation. .Net was the natural runtime environment for Silverlight. The point of Moonlight is to support that client technology on more platforms than just windows. Yes, .Net and Mono can both run on Windows. In that case, it's up to the user to pick. I'm guessing in most cases they won't care will will just stick with de facto .Net.

I think there were also questions about XAML, vector graphics, and I kinda lost track of the thread from there.. so let's get back to the technical discussion.

-j