MIX07 in Las Vegas

The MIX07 conference is currently underway in Las Vegas, because apparently there is no better place to unveil the future of the web than a city built on neon, gambling and the firm belief that subtlety is for losers. The reports are pouring in, and one word keeps appearing with almost religious frequency: Silverlight.

Flash is still the reigning heavyweight champion when it comes to graphics-heavy presentations on the web. It’s everywhere, occasionally brilliant, frequently irritating and by now practically part of the plumbing. Microsoft naturally has decided that this situation cannot be allowed to continue without a Microsoft alternative. Enter Silverlight.

For developers already living comfortably inside the Microsoft ecosystem, the proposition is certainly tempting. You can write code-behind in C# or another CLR language much as you already do with ASP.NET. Data access becomes considerably less painful than some of the plumbing Flash developers have learned to endure with the weary resignation of people trapped in a bad marriage.

And debugging ActionScript? Anyone who has spent an afternoon tearing out perfectly good hair while trying to figure out why a Flash application has suddenly developed a personality disorder may appreciate this part: with Silverlight in Orcas, we can debug code on both the client and the server.

The Grand Canal inside The Venetian.

Then there’s CoreCLR powering the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, along with the new Dynamic Language Runtime, offering support for Ruby, Python and more. Silverlight also bridges JavaScript and CLR code, allowing CLR code to manipulate the DOM. If that sentence made your eyes glaze over slightly, you’re not alone. Scott Hanselman has produced a schematic diagram explaining the whole arrangement, and there’s also a developer reference chart for those who enjoy diagrams containing enough arrows to plan a minor military campaign.

Technically, it’s impressive stuff. But there is, as usual, a slightly less glamorous corner of the casino. I suspect precious little development time has been spent worrying about accessibility and compatibility with web standards. Big surprise, I know. Screen readers, search engines and anyone foolish enough to believe that web content should remain usable outside a particular technological ecosystem may therefore have some interesting times ahead.

We’ve spent years trying to move the web toward standards, accessibility and platform independence. Now along comes another shiny browser technology promising richer applications, better tools and all the irresistible toys developers love. And developers do love toys. Whether we remember to ask what happens when the batteries run out is another matter entirely.

When the smoke clears, the cocktails have been consumed and the Las Vegas neon finally stops flickering behind our eyelids, one rather extraordinary fact remains: We now have managed code running inside the browser. Lord have mercy on us all.