Microsoft Emphasizes HTML5 Over Silverlight

Everyone I've spoken to who went to Mix11 came out of it feeling better about Silverlight not worse. What I've heard is the message at Mix11 was that Silverlight was being presented as Microsoft's preferred native environment going forward while HTML5 was the preferred web development model.

(Note there were no sessions devoted entirely to Microsoft's current desktop solution WPF)

To that point they reiterated their support for the Mac meaning Silverlight is an environment that can be used for out of browser apps that run on both Mac and PC (much like Adobe AIR).

That article was written after the first day of Mix. Silverlight 5 features weren't to be announced until the Day 2 keynote, which was almost all about Silverlight (on the phone and the web).

Microsoft's position on HTML5 and Silverlight seem extremely clear to me. If you're doing cross-platform their focus is now HTML5. You won't see much of an investment on Silverlight for the Mac, for example. But if you're developing exclusively for Windows, then Silverlight is your best bet.

Regarding WPF at Mix -- Mix is a web conference and WPF is NOT a web technology. Expect WPF sessions at PDC (a couple to a few at most), although I do think that WPF and Silverlight are merging (with Silverlight basically just catching up to WPF, with WPF being left to handle niche Win32 interop scenarios).

I think the fact that they demoed IE10 running well on a 1.0ghz ARM, coupled with last year's emphasis on Windows 8 running on an ARM device, speaks volumes about the future.

Windows has had HTML/CSS/JavaScript "native" apps since Vista. If IE10 + Win8 results in "native HTML5" being performant even on mobile devices, it seems likely that HTML5 is soon to be the new Silverlight in terms of simple out-of-browser apps.