Regarding the lack of support for anything like Action Message Format:

Adobe’s Action Message Format is essentially a binary version of SOAP, only it’s proprietary. You can do the same thing in Sliverlight, for example using SOAP and gzip content encoding (which works just fine, is entirely standards based and more flexible than AMF) and leaving the HTTP connection open. You can equally write your own proprietary binary data format to use in Sliverlight if you want to.

Regarding needing to use the Expression tools, or even Windows:

You don’t actually need to use the Expression tools, and you don’t need to use Windows to develop Silverlight applications. It’s worth remembering that Silverlight isn’t just aimed at “designers”, but also at “developers” (note the quotation marks…) and while the Expression tools are likely to be of significant interest to those who are designers there is nothing to stop developers on Linux or Mac (or Windows) from developing Silverlight using another IDE – there are Mono/C# plugins for Eclipse, X-Code, Text Mate and other editors.

My point being that depending on what sort of application you are writing (or even, just how you want to write it) you might not even want to use the Expression tools at all. I would agree that not having the Expression tools available on Mac could hurt adoption among designers, although I get the impression from those I know who are exclusively designers it’s not nearly as mac-centric a profession as it once was (in fact these days almost all developers I know use Mac but none of the designers I know do!).

On “Silverlight is a browser-only solution”:

While technically an accurate statement, couldn’t be more off the mark in context. With C#/.NET you can reduce code duplication by sharing the same code in your web application, a server application and a desktop application – encouraging you to write classes once then wrap calls to them appropriately (which C# largely makes very easy).

The design also means that if you do roll out a .NET/Mono desktop application you can write a powerful and fully native desktop application, rather than having to compromise in terms of functionality. That said, I do think it would be prudent to provide the option to roll out Silverlight desktop applications easily for those who are just looking for something simple that is essentially a Director replacement.

Regarding VC-1 rather than H.264 support:

I gather that’s because it’s less CPU intensive to decode VC-1 than H.264 and hence more suitable for deployment (still, it does seem silly to me not ALSO have support H.264 out of the box).

Yes it is.

Have you seen this site?

http://deepzoom.soulclients.com/VE/

Re: Simon is right to ponder on offline functionality I think, I met with MS recently on Silverlight and apart from a brief nod to some offline caching, the focus seems to be very much on the online experience.

AdrianB

Silverlight will run offline, hosted by MOE…

Thanks Simon. I agree that Mesh + Silverlight is a really interesting combination. I presume the demo you saw was still browser-based though?

Tim

It was demoed back at Web 2.0 in the Live Mesh keynote. At the time it was said that enabling offline running would take just 25 lines of code. I guess we’ll see the tooling at PDC.