I have been thinking a bit and there are a few reasons I like Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology.

1. One reason is that the Silverlight could potentially make the need for Windows Media Player on a host machine obsolete. During the week I removed Windows Media Player from a machine and tested a Silverlight application on it that uses video.
2. Silverlight is easy to host. You simply add a mime type to IIS. You can find a guide to doing that here.
3. Silverlight has a Linux implementation called Moonlight.
4. Integration with Visual Studio 2008. This is an important feature for an web/application developer because your C#/VB.NET skills can be used to develop and enhance Silverlight applications. XAML plays an important role here and bridges the gap between design and development significantly.

How many sites actually use Silverlight? Silverlight is a Microsoft technology that allows you to create rich and dynamic content for the web. The same Silverlight applications can also be used as desktop applications with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). With that in mind I Googled for sites that actually use Silverlight in a live production environment. I already knew of the Hardrock Memorabilia site that uses the Deep Zoom feature. I showed this to some people at work and they were amazed, as was I. So check it out, but be warned you will be required to install a plugin.

So are there other sites that use Silverlight? And if so, what is the quality thereof. I found a site called Nibbles Tutorials which is done entirely with Silverlight. They also have tutorials and samples that you can look at. I found a few more examples on this blog. This site uses Silverlight in a way that allows you to page through books, which is not that new. This site shows a jeep of some kind that you can rotate. Another site allows you to create a valentine’s day card. A museum also used Silverlight and the Deep Zoom effect. Vertigo are the guys who developed the Hardrock Cafe Memorabilia website. They have some Silverlight content as well including a slideshow presentation. Pyramid fashion also use Silverlight.