If you don’t have Scott Guthrie’s blog bookmarked and you do .Net programming, then you should bookmark it now. Mr. Guthrie is the General Manager at Microsoft responsible for .Net, IIS, Silverlight, WPF and Visual Studio. When he posts information about the aforementioned products, you know its as accurate as it is going to get.
There is a new post on his blog about the release schedule for Silverlight 2.0 (aka Silverlight 1.1 Alpha) and IIS 7. Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Flash/Flex and more. The 2.0 release will have support for the .Net Common Language Runtime inside the browser (IE & Firefox) on Windows, Mac (Intel) and Linux (you read the correctly, Linux). I have tinkered with the 1.1 Alpha, and its pretty cool running C# inside Firefox on my Mac. C# code can call out to the DOM and make changes to the web page, and JavaScript can call into the Silverlight runtime as well. This reminds me of the old Java/JavaScript integration in Netscape.
Microsoft has already made it pretty easy to install and update Silverlight on IE. I have noticed that the auto-update functionality does not seem to work in Firefox, but it is easy enough to get it installed or to download an update and install that.
I can see a time in the very near future where the web apps I write host the same .Net object I would right for the desktop. The dream of being able to share large amounts of code between web and desktop/n-tier applications could be realized in 2008.
