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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Good question - I have no idea who Silverlight is for. It might make sense for internal corporate applications - but they don't need to look very pretty so all the integration with design stuff is irrelevant.

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Silverlight is fairly irrelevant. Look for it to go the way of all the other MS cast-offs, here in a few years.

For developers (developers developers) who like to use .NET. Not sure about end users.

it's actually pretty nice for that--- with vaguely reasonable effort you can make the same app run on .NET on the desktop and Silverlight on the browser

Silverlight 3 began the push into the desktop, and Silverlight 4 takes it even further. WPF is getting phased out, and Silverlight is becoming the way to make desktop apps with an MS stack.

The latest version of the enterprise trash I develop for replaced a mid-90's Win32 GUI with Silverlight running in a browser... leaving intact the Java database connection code. When I installed it on my machine I had to reinstall Java before it would work.

But that's more a testament to the vendor's "now with $AWESOME_PLATFORM!"-driven software architecture paradigm than any real fault of Silverlight or Java. (Except that they both appeal to those sorts of people.)

It's aiming at the same people who'd otherwise use java applets - i.e. web based applications that need to do stuff flash can't (e.g. file system operations or just use an exiting java lib or even just more easily communicate with a java-based back-end system) or for stuff flash is simply too slow for.

You see it a lot in the enterprise world.

Facebook also has a couple of applets I think.

It is a nice fit for enterprise internal applications, it's an easy sell to upgrade systems written in .NET/ VB6.

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