By James Cooley - September 26 2007 tags: sliverlight gnash galway linux

Martha was explaining about how you could add or kill (remove) child nodes from a XAML generated UI in her talk about Silverlight at the Galway AMTUG. After showing how Silverlight could kill children we got the quote of the night

"Silverlight does not kill children!"
Microsoft is a bit worried about it's corporate image so it's just as well we got that clarified :) Flash looks pretty safe too in case you were worried about it. Sliverlight looks interesting but there are a couple of things to get sorted out (from memory):
  1. Streaming only works with a Microsoft backend server
  2. It doesn't use the GPU so be careful
  3. It's XML again (a bit like XUL, SVG and others just different)
  4. it doesn't run on Linux
  5. Silverlight applications can't be indexed by Google. [You can produce something that can be indexed though.]
The Ruby and Python integration is an interesting direction. Microsoft are good at VMs - they pretty much saved Java on Windows with their first JVM.

Interesting talk. I'm more interested in Gnash, a free Flash runtime that can (almost) play youtube videos.

It was almost a full house with a very good speaker. Thanks to Mick Lohan for twisting my arm to see a Microsoft presentation at BarCampGalway. We'll have to get Mick to organise our Galway Linux Users' Group launch. Unfortunately, we'll only have free as in Freedom, we'll have to buy our own beer.