One year and ten months is how long it's taken Microsoft to release their third version of Silverlight.  From the beginning, Silverlight has been media and consumer focused.  Projects such as the NBC Olympics, Wimbledon, the NCAA March Madness basketball video player have defined what Silverlight is.  What isn't as well known is that Silverlight is quickly becoming a viable option for RIA development.  

Despite Silverlight 3 and Blend 3 being launched a day early, last Friday was the official product launch event in San Francisco.  The keynote was headlined by Scott Guthrie, VP of the Microsoft's Developer Division, who introduced a number of high profile projects featuring Microsoft's Live Smooth Streaming technology, as well as projects that highlight Deep Zoom, Out of Browser, and Silverlight's Line of Business capabilities. The companies and projects highlighted came from diverse business verticals ranging from MGM (with the new Stargate Universe Deep Zoom experience) to Continental Airlines (who told their RIA story).  Finally, the day wasn't all about Silverlight, the Expression team had a major release as well; Blend 3 and SketchFlow were given the final slot of the keynote. 

After lunch the afternoon featured sessions that took a deeper dive into some of the announcements.  It started off with Jon Harris demoing SketchFlow.  Announced to immense interest at MIX, this is the first time SketchFlow is publicly available.  The product ships with Expression Blend and is geared at creating interactive low-fi prototypes/wireframes, along with facilitating client feedback, and producing skeleton documentation for your prototype.

Another session focused on Silverlight Smooth Streaming, which enables adaptive streaming of media over HTTP.  Over the past week there have been a number of HD events broadcast using this technology: Wimbledon, the Tour de France, AVP Volleyball, and the Michael Jackson Memorial Service.  

Through all the excitement, the biggest loser of the day was Expression Web.  Not because the product is bad, there is only one direction from FrontPage...up, but because it was overshadowed once again by Silverlight and Blend announcements.  Ed Meadows and Erik Saltwell gave a great session test driving new features like PHP support, PSD importing, and SuperPreview.  It's interesting the Expression Suite is supporting PHP and Photoshop imports, both in Blend and Web.  There seems to be realization that designers and developers are going to work in the technology and tools they know best.  (Of course, the Silverlight and Expression team would like you to use their stack, but you can't win anyone over by turning a blind eye to current and mature processes.  They've heard this a thousand times, but to win designers fully over the tools will need to port over to the Mac.)

Silverlight 3 feature set

Between Silverlight 2 and 3 there have been an astonishing amount of features added in a relatively short amount of time.  Silverlight 3 is currently in a release where feature sets are being matched and exceeded with other RIA technologies, namely Flash. To compete Silverlight 3 adds the capabilities of perspective 3d, pixel shaders, h.264 support, GPU acceleration, and a bitmap api.  To differentiate  Photosynth, Out of Browser, smooth streaming, and improvements to Deep Zoom are available.

At the very least, Silverlight 3's release indicates that there is commitment behind the platform.  It forces Adobe and Java to innovate to stay competitive.  RIA's in general greatly benefit by having this level of competition.  Despite the comparatively low penetration numbers, it's time to keep an eye on what Silverlight has to offer.

Read more from Corey Schuman.