I realized recently that I am holding my breath for the news at the BUILD conference about Silverlight to come out. Actually I’ve been holding my breath for some time now. Since the “emphasis shift” announced at the 2010 PDC my unconditional believe in and love of Silverlight is undermined. And that was the basis for writing books and doing presentations about XAML and Silverlight in the first place. Don’t get me wrong: I still love Silverlight and I am anxious to start working with the new features in Silverlight 5. But silently I hope for a much greater role for either Silverlight or XAML in a future called Windows 8.
I’ll be watching the keynote on Tuesday at the Dutch Microsoft office and I will send live Tweets of course. I’m hoping for a continuation of the current capabilities of Silverlight and some extra use for XAML in the coming platform. I do hope WP7 apps will work on Windows 8 with no or little changes. I do think the future is bright because it contains Silverlight.
I’ve retweeted a tweet the other day of which I think the prediction for use of XAML in Windows 8 is ”about right’. But I also hope that Microsoft is keeping silent because the architectural changes in Windows 8 are larger and very different from what we all expect.
Still, I am holding my breath…