The short of the story is that Silverlight 1.0 applications don't support code-behind, they don't support making plain XML calls back to a web service (despite some other people's claims to the contrary, 1.0 will not let you do this!), and there is no real two-way binding (though you can set values of controls in response to events, which is what I call "old school" binding).

Silverlight 1.1, however.. now this whole project is actually starting to show some promise. For starters, Silverlight 1.1:

• Supports communication via XML over HTTP, which makes it ideal for "RESTy POX". Note that the 1.1 alpha version doesn't allow cross-domain access, so you'll still have to drop in server-side service proxies for accessing remote services (which is actually more secure anyway....)
• You can write "code behind" your Silverlight apps in C# or VB.NET
• You can write your Silverlight apps using the Dynamic Language Runtime, which means you get to use VB9 or IronPython.
• Still has all the rich media/video support that Silverlight 1.0 has
• Create a "Silverlight" project from Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1.

I'm going to be looking into this further and will be posting my thoughts on it, but now that we can finally play with a "real" version of Silverlight, we can hopefully stop the insanity that was the 1.0 version.

tags: silverlight  beta  alpha
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