It’s not an entirely surprising move given that any attempt to make any headroom against Flash/Flex is going to take a near miracle to get some decent level of acceptance. So far my biggest interest in looking at using Microsoft’s new Flash competitor is that the Flex (the development/activescipt side of Flash) development environment blows chunks. It’s ungainly, and quite frankly so much of a bother that the only reason people force their way through dealing with it is that there’s no other option… until now.

Silverlight’s editor embeds very nicely into Visual Studio 2008, thankyouverymuch, and the context completion and overall integration (into source control as well), is already in a beta state far better than Flex could hope to be in the next 2+ years.

 But then that said, Flex has a massive head start, and with AJAX moving along as quickly as it is, the question really could also be put to being - is there a point to all this anyway at this point? With IE8 appearing to actually be W3C complaint for the first time, there stands to be a chance to really be able to build web applications that’ll be cross-browser compatable with far less headache than before.

But then Flex and Silverlight are so danged pretty… Microsoft though still has to get people to actually use the stuff. So what if it’s better than Flex - betamax was better too, and when was the last time you ever saw a Betamax tape, let alone actually watched one.