Why Silverlight?

Visual Studio

Here’s a video I shot at the Silverlight panel discussion at TechEd Europe 2009 in Berlin.

Question was: what is the problem that Silverlight is trying to solve?

From what I could get out of the answers, the idea is threefold:

  1. Silverlight is a solution to line of business applications that, for reasons of reach, need to run in the browser.
  2. Silverlight is a media platform that support DRM and (live) streaming capabilities.
  3. Silverlight is a better alternative to Flash, especially for developers that are comfortable with the .NET Framework and languages such as C# and Visual Basic.

These answers were not given all at once in this particular video, but it became more clear during the rest of the discussion.

Are the reasons mentioned here valid, and what’s your reason for using Silverlight?