Again, I wasn't targeting this at people still supporting XP and the like. Unlike WPF, I don't see Microsoft back-porting DirectUI especially not to XP. My article was targeted at the people up in arms about the death of Silverlight.
13 karma · joined May 22, 2011
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.
The Office hub integrates with Sharepoint Online allowing you to collaborate on documents from your phone. Make annotations etc. Included in this is OneNote which becomes a portable notebook.
The Games hub has full Xbox live integration with games from the major publishers made specifically for the phone.
Facebook and Twitter both have multiple clients both "Official" and third party.
Netflix, Kindle, Youtube, and a number of other major media outlets have native clients.
4th and Mayor is a foursquare app that was written as an example app by a member of Microsoft's platform evangelism team (http://www.4thandmayor.com/)
So far there hasn't been a case where I wanted an app to do something on my phone and couldn't find multiple examples both free and paid. The ecosystem is very robust. Microsoft just released tools to simplify porting apps from iOS and Android so it's only going to grow from there.