Hey folks, This is a repost from an internal email that really should have been public.
---- Apologies for not sharing with the team my thoughts on Silverlight as the conference was unwrapping. I think folks found out about my interest on Silverlight from Martin LaMonica's blog entry. Silverlight 1.1 is obviously very aligned with the work that we are doing, and if someone is going to implement that it is a natural fit for our team to do so. For one, the majority of the work are the upgrades to the 3.5 libraries (System.Core.dll, completing generics, C# 3). Today our main goal is to allow a smooth migration of developers from Windows to Linux (ok, it is not smooth at all right now, you kind of have to be a Unix user to do the transition at all). Silverlight brings another component into the equation: a lack of Linux/Silverlight will prevent the Linux desktop from getting some content. Whether it will be a big or small issue is yet to be debated, but regardless of this, it seems that Silverlight is a lot of fun to implement. WPF is too big, and there is very little gain, at least in the next 3-4 years, because there is no migration strategy for every ISV that has invested in Winforms, so the only usage scenarios for WPF were new applications, or people that were willing to throw out their investments and pretty much start from scratch. On the other hand, Silverlight is a tiny subset of WPF, relatively easy to implement (a weekend hack, two at most as it has been pointed out by some of you) and it will be used to spice up existing web-based applications as opposed to rewriting an application. Now, we have a bunch of challenges ahead of us, and it is not clear when we should start work on a Mono-based Silverlight, I think we should but we must: * Ship MonoDevelop 1.0, and continue improving it as we wont be a kick-ass development platform until we move beyond Makefiles and debugging with gdb and mdb on the command line. We keep saying Mono is a better development platform, but it wont be for the unwashed massed until we get this. * Ship Windows.Forms and ASP.NET 2.0: there are hundreds of people trying to move their applications to Mono today, and we are going to need to complete both of these before we can enable the next wave of migrations. Which is sadly the majority of applications. (caveat: I rather have Mainsoft do Webparts that doing it ourselves) Implicit in the above is completing the 2.0 profile, and determine what we can implement, and what we can postpone. * Visual Studio integration: we are going to have to come up with a strategy to get VS developers to deploy on Linux. A major blocker for the VS integration is that it wont be a great experience today until we finish Winforms and ASP. In a way, am ok with the lack of a Visual Studio plugin today if only because we would not look very good to Windows developers in our current conditions. Once we finish 2.0, it would be good to have the plugin ready. Andreia started a bit of a specification here: http://www.mono-project.com/Visual_Studio_Integration But it is a bit of a how-to. I would want to figure out instead *what* is that we want to achieve, what kind of experience people will get, and then discuss how we get there. Considering the above, am not sure when and how we could start work on Silverlight. That being said, am obviously excited, and I have done some early research on the various areas that will need work, I have posted the details here: http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight The name was suggested by Sebastien (who also has done some research that I hope he will post into that wiki page as well). Miguel. _______________________________________________ Mono-devel-list mailing list Mono-devel-list@lists.ximian.com http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-devel-list