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We don't need to learn a new language

A Gray 5th Sep 2008

For .Net developers, Silverlight is easy to transition to and easy to incorporate into our projects. We can use the same business logic/classes we wrote for other systems in .Net. If you're an old school EJB developer, Silverlight is probably as strange as Flash, but if you do .Net now, Silverlight is extremely easy.

Silverlight is more acompetator of Flex than just Flash, because it has a lot of client/server power. you can also share sessions with your web sessions and interact with multiple servers at the same time (with special permissions).

Since Silverlight is part of Microsoft, you automatically get the latest Silverlight plug-in with Windows updates. That bankroll you're talking about comes from the real power of Microsoft--marketshare. I remember the arguments from Netscape about it being ubiquitous and IE being slow and error-prone. Now the only people who use non-IE browsers are Mac users and people who won't use Microsoft out of principle ("I'm not using MS and you can't make me!").

Flash is still good and there are lots of existing apps and future MS-hater code camps that will keep it around. But its a hard sell for new projects using .Net compared with Silverlight; the art is done by artists and the code is done by the same web devs that do the rest of the site.