Patrick Cauldwell and I have just completed presenting two one day deep-dive sessions on what we felt are practical Silverlight topics. After thinking about it, I have decided that over the next few days I will share some of my demos with my editorializing. In my first presentation, I covered Styling, Skinning and Custom Controls, and in my second presentation I covered Silverlight/browser integration.  The first topic I will be addressing will be "How to use Silverlight as a replacement for Javascript libraries". As I complete each topic, I will add them to the following table of contents: Silverlight as...

After sitting through half a day of MIX07, I have finally seen something that crystallized my disquiet about AJAX. Having seen the tortured workflow involved in developing any substantial Javascript-based web app and wondered about a whole new class of as-yet-undiscovered client-side Javascript attacks on AJAX applications, I have been loathe to advocate for wholesale AJAX adoption. What made me see the light was Silverlight. I had been mildly interested in Silverlight, and knew that a cross-platform version of the CLR was involved. But what put it over the top for me was seeing remote, interactive debugging of a Silverlight application...