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Comment by teyc | Hacker News Reader

The title is all wrong. He is not in charge of Silverlight. Pure speculation.

My reading of directui is that XAML is staying but Silverlight libraries are a dead end. If you are a component vendor, you will stop writing additional components for Silverlight. This also heralds the end of any ecosystem for Silverlight. Yes, there may be SL die hards, but they are going to be like Visual FoxPro developers today. Abandoned.

Developers over the next few years are going to have to migrate their work over to DirectUI for tablet development while retaining Silverlight for Windows 7 OS. Oh Silverlight, we hardly knew you.

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There is indeed some speculation on my part...but it is based on diving into what is publicly available. There are threads where people have dissected the leaked builds and shown how to create apps using the same apis that you use today for Silverlight. I personally have not downloaded any of them (though I'm significantly tempted).

True, Silverlight apps may not port directly, especially if you break out of the sandbox and do things that aren't supported within the platform. But because of the fact that Silverlight compiles down to IL...all Microsoft needs to do is bring the Silverlight VM over and boom it just works.

Basically what I've done is looked at the current state of the ecosystem and what has been revealed publicly for the future and connected the dots. If you look at the demo video and observe some of the animations and rich interaction being shown, it's obvious that it's not just HTML on display there.

Yeah, I've been following the naiveuser Jupiter dissection. There is no Silverlight runtime. A new library has been developed on top of DirectUI, similar to Win32 on WinNT. It is not WPF and it is not Silverlight. It will probably start as a subset and end up as a superset. Some parts will not map directly from Silverlight. It looks like the animations have a new model. You will have to port your SL app for this to work.

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