The fall and rise of Microsoft's UX platform (pun intended)

The last couple of days in the aftermath of PDC 2010 has been quite stressful. Mary Jo Foleys posted an interview with Bob Muglia about Microsoft shifting in their strategy for Silverlight. With the post series by Scott Barnes as a backdrop, it sure looked pale for Silverlight - on the outside.

It wasn’t so much the article itself from Mary that screamed death - but all the interpretations of the content. Sure, it was easy to read into it that this could mean that Microsoft was in fact dropping Silverlight all together - except for on the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Today, Bob Muglia has published the following statement, that should clear up any misunderstanding.

Make no mistake; we’ll continue to invest in Silverlight and enable developers to build great apps and experiences with it in the future.

Also, Steve Ballmer has a PDC Thoughts statement about this.

Tim Heuer, Silverlight program manager has invested a lot in the success of Silverlight, his post about this can be found here.

Back in September, the Silverlight team blogged about the future of Silverlight. And you might find the interview with Scott Guthrie on Silverlight TV interesting as well, just a couple of days prior to PDC.

During PDC2010, Microsoft announced a completely redesigned portal for Windows Azure, based on Silverlight (Azure announcements here). This comes in addition to a set of other tools for Azure already built on top of Silverlight. One little tidbit to mention also, is that PDC2010 had all its online content delivered through Silverlight as well.

So - fear not, Silverlight is far from dead!

UPDATE: Scott Guthrie also posted a post, answering questions about Silverlight.