Silverlight 5 has been released

[a_bertrand]

Silverlight 5 has been released with tons of changes, some which can really show huge potential. Too bad it doesn't work on Linux.

http://www.silverlight.net/learn/overview/what%27s-new-in-silverlight-5

[Neon]

So for someone not completely understanding of Silverlight. Am I correct in saying that this is Microsoft's response to flash? Except attempting to make something more powerful, less resource intensive and easier to run any everything.

[a_bertrand]

Well yes and no.

Flash primary objective is to have vectoriel animations, and movies. The coding has been introduced somewhat later on and is more or less like a Javascript. Even if you can do a lot, I must say that for a programer point of view it is sub-par.

Silverlight took the inverse road which was to offer a complete object oriented approach, with a huge library under. It is mainly thought for programmers with a designer available (which I never really used).

It is really like 2 different products even if at the end of the day you can nearly make the same things with one or the other. If you are more of the artist kind, then flash may be better for you, where if you are more the coder kind or want to be able to have a more complex / complete approach silverlight would be the solution.

Silverlight is mainly used for business applications... at least currently.