The Future of Silverlight Unveiled on December 2

There are now less than two weeks until Microsoft will unveil its future plans for Silverlight, its Adobe Flash rival technology.

The Redmond company is most likely going to share the first details on the successor of Silverlight 4, which could end up branded as Silverlight 5, although the software giant has yet to confirm this.

A Silverlight Firestarter event has been set for December 2nd, 2010, with Microsoft indicating that the “Future of Silverlight Starts Now.”

The event is available free of charge to participants, both online and on location, and will be keynoted by Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform.

Developers familiar with the technology undoubtedly already know that if Guthrie is involved in the event, it means that Microsoft is ready to indeed offer some consistent information about the evolution of Silverlight, possibly details about the forthcoming version.

In a blog post the past week, Guthrie made sure to emphasize the importance of the Firestarter event in order to get as many participants as possible.

According to the Corporate VP, this is one Firestarter that Silverlight developers won’t want to miss.

“I’ll be kicking off the event with a 90 minute keynote on the future of Silverlight. In it I’ll cover our future Silverlight roadmap, and provide a first look at some of the exciting things coming. If you are interested in Silverlight you won’t want to miss it,” he explained.

Personally, I expect Guthrie to guarantee that Microsoft continues to remain committed to Silverlight moving forward, even in the context of the company’s increasing focus on HTML5.

In addition, I think that Guthrie will also point out that Microsoft’s vision and overall strategy for Silverlight has changed, and that there’s more to the technology than Cloud-based rich experiences, where HTML5 is expected to be king, especially in the context of hardware accelerated browsers.


I also believe that Guthrie will offer insight into the evolution of Silverlight, and even some details related to Silverlight vNext.