What I like about Silverlight is that it has the potential to, in a sense, democratize animation on the web. Right now, if you want to animate stuff, your choice is to use Flash. However, the development environment for Flash is expensive and a bit of a pain to use. Silverlight, on the other hand, is just a way to render an XML text file. Animation and logic can be scripted using Javascript. This makes it very easy and accessible to me.

Of course, it is a Microsoft product and they are trying to hard to cobble the technology with their own expensive solutions while at the same time keeping it just XML. So, I feel a bit like the fox giving the scorpion a ride across the river. I fully expect to get bit at some point.

But, until that time, and working through some of the gotchas (why can't I center text within a rectangle?), I think Silverlight might be fun to play with.

The animation to the right started off as the clock demo from Microsoft. The clock is still there. I've made it smaller and added some elements.

The animation pulls XML data from a few sources. For example, the weather is an XML feed. The events that scroll by are also from an XML feed. Here that feed is static but it can be dynamic easily.