Yesterday, Microsoft has released Silverlight 1.0, its tool for creation Rich Internet Applications. I’ve seen the Silverlight demos at Redmond, WA earlier this year, and they are very impressive.  Now we are talking about some competition to Adobe Flex and Flash Player. I use the word “some” because as of September 2007 Adobe is far ahead when it comes to maturity of Flex platform and the penetration of Flash Player. Microsoft will be playing catch for a while, and they need to deliver on the promise of Silverlight availability an all major platforms.
 
While today Microsoft can only dream about the penetration rates of Flash Player, Adobe can only dream of having such a huge crowd of enterprise developers that's already waiting in sprinter’s position to start using Silverlight in their projects.  In any case, having some serious competition in the RIA tools market is very good news for us, professional developers.

Silverlight 1.0 will run on Common Language Runtime (CLR), but upcoming 1.1 release will run on so called Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), which will allow programming RIA in such dynamic scripting languages as Ruby, Python and some others.

Good luck, Silverlight!  Now let’s wait and see what Sun Microsystems will offer with JavaFX next year. No matter what tool you are going to be using, consider converting your Web applications into RIA. The sooner the better.