Dax is on a rant about WPF and Silverlight.

Look, I'm really happy with Silverlight. I'll be even more when I get to go deep inside Silverlight. But let's not forget WPF. That's the root technology.

Andy and I just had this discussion about Silverlight. His company is really deep into Silverlight and he's just worshipping it like a madman. I'm still iffy about Silverlight. But he and I both agreed on one thing: keep the web and desktop separate to a point.

My company is knee deep in Silverlight.  Although Dax makes it sound like I have a school-boy crush, I must admit that Silverlight answers two very specific issues we are having with our AJAX/SVG solution.  Our customers were giving us feedback on scalability/performance issues.  We have come up with some innovative (paten pending) solutions to the issue, but when I ported over our code to even the alpha-bits of Silverlight they are a 1,000 times faster -- bye bye performance problems!

What Dax and I did agree on, though, was the fact that the muddying of the waters isn't "a good thing."  We (as an industry) need to focus on leveraging the benefits of each platform.  Rather than trying to make "each platform look the same" we should be taking advantage of what each offers.  Rather than have a least-common-denominator interface that runs on both the Web and the Desktop, we should be creating applications that have a similar "feel" between the two delivery mediums.  I actually always wished that VB.Net and C# were actually different, rather than just different wrappers to the CLR.  That way, each language could have innovated in specific problem spaces.  If VB.Net had "just focused" on making client applications, and C# had "just focused" on 'business logic', the languages could have evolved differently.

My hope is with XAML, that we use XAML as purely the language for describing a user interface (user experience), and leave the processing out of it.  My fear, though, is that the industry will try to make XAML yet-another utility language, and I'll see articles with the title "Programming the WebService security model with XAML" and "Simulating deterministic destructors with XAML and WPF"