Lazycoder

Mix 07 Keynote announcements

Well one out of three isn’t bad. Although you could stretch a bit and say that the embedded CLR in Silverlight qualifies as a “universal gadget platform”. One thing noticeably absent, any mention of time lines. We already knew that Silverlight was going to contain the CLR, they announced it last year at Mix ’06. So I’m not going to salivate over that too much. So actually that was a little bit of a non-announcement.

The ability to use dynamic languages in Silverlight applications is a bit of a non-starter. What does it really mean? Is it just another block on the “skinnable languages” aspect of the CLR? I think one thing it means for sure, you can’t just plop a Rails or Django application into your .NET project and have it run. The Rails framework is more than just Ruby code. One question that I do have: Does this mean that managed JScript actually supports closures and dynamic typing now? Is managed JScript ACTUALLY ECMA/Javascript?

What I’m really looking for is a chart showing me which technology I should choose when developing my next web application. ASP.NET + AJAX? Silverlight? WPF? Microsoft is falling farther into a technology maze.