A monolithic system which is always going to have problems
'Moonlight 2.0, the first version with .NET support, is still in preview.'
'First, it is a media client for Microsoft's IIS Media Services'
'The tools for Silverlight are Visual Studio for coding'
'The current add-in for Visual Studio 2008 has no visual designer. Visual Studio 2010 has proper support, but is currently in beta'
'export the revised project as a Word document'
'Tool support is not quite there, but once Blend 3.0 and Visual Studio 2010 are available, the company will have a great...'
'Despite these reservations, Silverlight is shaping up to be what client-side .NET should have been from the beginning: lightweight, high-performance, cross-platform...'
So it only runs on certain browsers - and all dev/deployment is MS only. 'Cross platform' sounds a bit hollow to me.
Bear in mind, that in the next couple of years there's likely to be millions of non-MS client devices (I think Google OS will gain good traction) I would say it would be very dodgy to base long term projects on this stack.
'The pace of development is remarkable'
Well it would be if this was anything close to a finished product...
'promising to end problems with blurry text, though it falls short of the elegant Text Layout framework in Flash 10'
'Although .NET RIA Services provide valuable features, they are currently a Community Technology Preview, and Microsoft warns of significant changes to come, so they are currently aimed at brave or experimental developers.'
I worked extensively with .NET and it could have been good if they'd kept at the cross-platform track. I.e. Deployable on other web servers, code could be written with any text browser and not reliant on VS, removed the obsession with compiling components and .DLL's, portable between servers, backward compatible so that your didn't need to have .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.5 installed at the same time, truly cross-browser (page repositioning only worked in IE)
This was another reason the Clinton's plan to split up MS (a la Baby Bells) would have been good for MS and could have produced good technology. As it is they still tie everything together so it's an all or nothing approach. No clearly defined protocols or boundaries produces a monolothic system which can lead to all sorts of unfixable problems.
Small tools, small tools!