This site from
Liquidboy is just the best showcase for
Silverlight that I've ever come across. To be honest when I first heard about
Silverlight I though...ah, it's our answer to flash...but the more I've learnt (both internally and externally) I'm realizing that this is the next big thing for UI development.
The stuff that people like Liquidboy are already doing with this really shows what's possible. I remember back in the late 90s when the company I worked for was creating
Flash and
Director based sites for some fairly big customers, but that really proved to be pretty niche (I remember banks were even trying whole sites based on Flash back then!). Now the next big thing is
AJAX...but that still has limitations...frankly it's still HTML and Javascript when it comes down to it.
A coherent message for Web UI has been missing until recently...to build really compelling, rich UIs you still need to have fairly good coding skills, another leap is needed to really popularize truly rich UI. We see technologies such as
Flex from
Adobe coming up (slowly, I haven't even seen a Flex app yet!). This and whatever Microsoft plan to do in this space (Silverlight will be a component but it only answers part of the question right now) will be truly interesting...it looks like an interesting few years is ahead!