Silverlight 2 got released about a week ago. And this is what ScottGu promises us.

Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plug-in that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser.

Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6M and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn’t already have it. It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications.

Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby).

That looks promising, especially if you are a .Net programmer like me. But let’s not forget that I’m a programmer and not a designer so my app won’t look as cool as it could.

I’m not convinced yet that Silverlight won’t go the same way as flash. And by that I mean that flash is being misused for advertising and moving things on a website. I hate things that flicker and move while watching a website, probably because most of those things are advertising. The whole advertising thing made people grab onto tools like adblock plus for firefox, or other flash adblocking programs.

Here are some of the suggested remedies.

• How to block Flash selectively
• SuperAdBlocker.Com
• Block Flash Ads in Firefox
• Adblocker for IE

Of course we all know that Youtube does have a good application for flash movies.

I’m not saying flash is bad. It did bring something to the webscene that was sorely needed. And that was a rich user experience. The user could finally do cool things in his webbrowser. The webpage was no longer static. There was user interaction on a scale where you could only dream of with javascript (at the time). But there was also java applets. What happened to them, how many people still use them?

So is Silverlight going to be that killer app we all want to use? Is it finally going to replace all that tedious HTML/CSS/Javascript stuff that we have to check a million times in a several thousand browser to see if we get the same result everywhere? I hope so. But since my crystal ball got broken, I can’t tell.

So I went out to see if people are coming up with any cool things for Silverlight yet.

• A list of Silverlight apps with sourcecode.
• This is a way cool and addictive game. My computer seemed to have some performance problems with it.
• Silverlight airlines. User friendly? Only if you give them the manual. I’m sure my parents won’t be able to use it. But cool none the less.
• Tetris. I think only Cobol doesn’t have a Tetris implementation ;-)
• dr.popper. Another game
• DeepearthPlayin with maps. A bit like googlemaps.

So the cool things are happening and are possible. We will see what the future brings but I think we should start installing Silverlight, it’s out there and it will be used.