Flash: 8 million downloads per day (3 billion per year): Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=691 YouTube and MSN Video (as of 2008-01) both use Flash video players and download the videos as *.FLV (Flash video) files.
Similarities to the transition from character-mode DOS to the original 16-bit Windows.
Yahoo Finance’s stock charting page has a beta version that uses Flash. Highly interactive. Nice animation. Pre-Flash version generates the charts on the server and downloads them as PNG files. Pre-Flash problems: Slow to update, wastes network bandwidth and server CPU cycles. http://finance.yahoo.com/charts/#chart1:symbol=adbe;range=my;compare=msft;indicator=split+dividend+volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;logscale=off;source=undefined
Picnik.com is an online photo-editor application implemented in Flash. The main pages are entirely Flash, no HTML. See: http://www.picnik.com/app
Retained mode graphics system vs. WM_PAINT messages. Specify the shape of an object once and WPF/SL takes care of drawing it from then on. Move whole shape just by changing its origin coordinates. WPF gets hardware acceleration, SL does not. WPF and SL coordinates are floating point values not integers (Win32, WinForms, HTML): WPF coordinates are in double-precision floating point: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742562.aspx SL coordinates are floating point like WPF, but in units of pixels not WPF’s DIPs: Nathan’s SL 1.0 book: p69.
Full released .NET 3.5 redistributable is about 200MB (I test downloaded 2008-01). http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=333325fd-ae52-4e35-b531-508d977d32a6&displaylang=en Full released .NET 3.0 redistributable is about 50MB.
V1.0 is only about 1.5MB in size on Windows. V1.1 alpha is about 4.5MB in size on Windows.
Silverlight Airlines: v1.1 sample implemented with C# code-behind http://silverlight.net/samples/1.1/SilverlightAirlines/Run/default.html
Beta interface to MS Download Center is done with Silverlight 1.0: http://www.microsoft.com/beta/downloads/Default.aspx
Intersoft Solutions – Sirius control set for Silverlight http://sirius.intersoftpt.com/