Is Silverlight Dead? Answer is “No, don’t be panic”

After the recent PDC 2010 event, we saw lots of tweets on Twitter about the same question “Is Silverlight Dead? Is HTML5 is going to take over the Silverlight? Is Microsoft changing their vision?” etc. etc. The answer is “No”. No need to worry about it. Silverlight is still there and will be there for Rich application development & smooth media streaming for long.

Read the whole post to know more about it.

After the post “Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted” made on ZDNet.com, there was a panic online about the Microsoft strategy on Silverlight and lots of tweets & blog posts happened during last 3 days on the same. Those who participated in the PDC2010 event directly or indirectly were in doubt about the future of Silverlight.

Bob Muglia, President of the Server & Tools division at Microsoft just cleared about it in Silverlight Team Blog. There he cleared all the points. He discussed about the Silverlight strategy of Microsoft. He clearly mentioned:

The purpose of Silverlight has never been to replace HTML, but rather to do the things that HTML (and other technologies) can’t, and to do so in a way that’s easy for developers to use.  Silverlight enables great client app and media experiences.  It’s now installed on two-thirds of the world’s computers, and more than 600,000 developers currently build software using it.  Make no mistake; we’ll continue to invest in Silverlight and enable developers to build great apps and experiences with it in the future.

He also mentioned the following in the Blog post, which clearly says that Microsoft is not changing their strategy from Silverlight to HTML5:

During the conference, I gave an interview where, among other things, I talked about the great work we’re doing with Silverlight – in particular, support for Windows Phone 7, which we featured heavily at the conference. The interview was accurately reported. I understand that what I said surprised people and caused controversy and confusion. As this certainly wasn’t my intent, I want to apologize for that. I’d like to use this post to expand on what I said, and talk about the very important role Silverlight has going forward.

In the interview, I said several things that I want to emphasize:

1. Silverlight is very important and strategic to Microsoft.
2. We’re working hard on the next release of Silverlight, and it will continue to be cross-browser and cross-platform, and run on Windows and Mac.
3. Silverlight is a core application development platform for Windows, and it’s the development platform for Windows Phone.

We haven’t yet publically announced a launch date for the next release of Silverlight, but we’ll talk more about it in the coming months.

If you are still confused, visit Silverlight Team Blog and read the whole announcement by Bob there.

Also, Steve Ballmer has commented on the PDC Thoughts and you can read it in the Microsoft News Center. According to Steve:

We’ve seen the emergence of a wide variety of Internet connected devices – and as I said last week, HTML 5 will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across these devices, and Microsoft will build the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows.  At the PDC we showed the great progress we are making on this with IE 9.  We will also enable browser scenarios that provide additional capabilities, including Silverlight.  Silverlight provides the richest media streaming capabilities on the web, and we will continue to deliver that on both Windows and Mac.

Hence, the last line from me will be “Don’t be confuse from the links available online, those already published”. Continue with your business development with Silverlight for web, OOB and WP7. If Microsoft is going to change their strategy on Silverlight, why should they bother about working on Visual Studio LightSwitch which is currently in Beta 1, why should they work on Windows Phone 7 which again a part of Silverlight. If they are going to change their vision, they should not stream the PDC live event through Silverlight Media Player. Read more on the same from the reference links.

Reference Resources:

• PDC Thoughts by Steve in Microsoft News Center
• PDC and Silverlight by Bob in Silverlight Team Blog
• Silverlight is dead. Long live Silverlight! by Tim Heuer
• My position on the #Silverlight debate by Laurent Bugnion
• Committed to Silverlight by John Papa