I’m not saying that I don’t want polished controls from Microsoft. My point was that there was a long lag between the Silverlight 1.0 release and the Silverlight 2.0 release, during which time we had – as you said – a glorified video player. During that time, we had Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, which had CLR support but couldn’t really be used because no users had it installed. During that time, we had no options – if Silverlight didn’t support it, you just couldn’t do it.

Here’s what we got:
Silverlight 1.0 RTW – September 2007 – Video, javascript programmability
Silverlight 2.0 RTW – October 2008 – .NET framework, controls, lots of other stuff

Here’s what I’d have preferred:
Silverlight 1.0 RTW – September 2007 – Video, javascript programmability
Silverlight 1.5 RTW – June 2008 – .NET framework
Silverlight 2.0 RTW – October 2008 – Controls, lots of other stuff

The benefit is that you’d get your full release with the controls at the same time, but in the meantime developers would have had options to build their own controls if they needed them.

I’m sure that would have been more difficulty there, because if they ran into issues building the controls they’d have to worry about breaking the API they’d shipped with Silverlight 1.5, but the benefit is that other developers outside of Microsoft would be developing real world applications and giving them better feedback on what needed to be in Silverlight 2.0.

XBAP’s are not an option for us because the apps we would like to write must run on the internet (as opposed to just an intranet). We cannot require that the .NET framework be installed on each client machine as is required by XBAP’s.

When the controls and platform are stable Silverlight be a viable option for implementing cross-platform LOB browser apps. I’m excited by the prospect of implementing rich browser-based applications using full-featured platforms such as .NET or Java. It will be interesting to see whether Silverlight or one of its competitors fills this void first.

I’m a designer that was asked to work on UI designs for a few WPF and SL apps. I worked for a Microsoft development shop and was the only designer on site (compared to about 50+ developers).

Here’s my two cents on the Designer part of the workflow. At first, I tried using Expression Design and Expression Blend for my design work. Expression Design is a decent tool, if vectors is all you work in. My experience trying to work with bitmaps in Expression Design was sub-par. Even working in vectors using Expression Design was sometimes a chore -> Try creating a crisp 1 px horizontal line without anti-aliasing it. You can do it in code, but not the design tool. So I jumped into Expression Blend. Not much better. Even when I did use Blend, the developers didn’t want all code from Blend, and really just wanted the path data. So I went back to what I knew –> Fireworks and thanks to Infragistics, I used their Fireworks->XAML exporter and I was in business. Not perfect, but I was able to continue with the tools that I’ve been using for 10+ years.

Designers, or at least the designer I know, don’t care about XAML. There isn’t anything for us to get interested in. Expression could export onto punch cards for all we care. Its the tool that allows us to be expressive that matters. This goes for both Expression Design and Blend. For me, what matters most is a tool that does its job well, doesn’t force me into yet another method of working, and allows me to easily prototype my designs.

The last note I wanted to say regarding getting designers interested is there is a complete lack of Mac tools. I may have worked in a Microsoft studio, but when I got home, I like to work on my Mac. I can’t play around with Silverlight in my off hours. No play time, then zero interest. Sure.. I can run Parallels or VMWware and work with a half solution, but why? And if I can’t run it and play with, it means I won’t find cool things to get my designer friends interested. And then we dont’ blog about it, etc etc.. and it doesn’t gain interest. The original appeal to Flash was that everyone seemed to be playing with it (even back in the Flash 4 days), it was approachable, and your friends were doing cool things with it, and it spread. Right now, too many things are keeping Silverlight from being more than a developer tool. Just my opinion.

Why do you think every .NET developer wants to develop their own controls? Why do we have to wait for the next version? We waited for them when 1.0 came out and now you suggest to wait even more!? Silverlight 1.0 was just a fancy video player and was pretty useless for creating data centric business apps.
Many developers want to use controls and concentrate on developing the business aspect of the application and not hand code controls themselves. Let the controls vendors do this job. If you want to create your own, go ahead but don’t be selfish and deny the millions of developers from being able to use readily made, thoroughly tested, polished controls.

Make all options available and you have the freedom to use the features you want and let others use whatever they like. But to suggest to limit the features doesnt make sense.
This attitude is also coming out from MVC purists. They don’t want any controls.

It frustrates me when people want to impose their beliefs on others.

I am also tired of all the Silverlight demos out there which heavily use the carousel control to show photos as if this control is so awesome.

Many developers say they want to use Silverlight to create Intranet business apps in their companies. What’s wrong with XBAP? Full WPF in the browser. I don’t see what Silverlight is buying them.