Microsoft pushes Silverlight
eWeek | at | by Mike
Silverlight: One small step for rich Internet application development, one giant step for Microsoft's push into the design and creative professionals market.
Ian Ellison-Taylor, product unit manager for WPF and Silverlight at Microsoft, said the company's trek from a strictly Windows PC focus to a cross-platform, cross-browser tool for delivering rich, graphical user experiences on devices and other platforms was like putting a man on the moon.
"It seemed, just a few years ago, to be this impossible task," Ellison-Taylor said. "And we had so many internal and external detractors all along saying that it would be an incredible task for us to get all the moving parts in place to do something like WPF and Silverlight. But having a little bit of faith, we plowed through it. It was a six-year effort to come out with WPF, and then shortly thereafter the Silverlight part of it.