What a week - Scoble mentioned a while ago that there was a decided lack of buzz out in the industry, that was changing prior to this week, but after Mix07 the growing buzz became a roar. With Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight and Adobe's recent announcements (open source Flex, Apollo) even before Ajax and the accompanying user experience it delivered has even settled into the market we are evolving past that.
Now whether Silverlight is for real is obviously still to be determined. MS isn't afraid of a fight though and certainly has cash to burn to invest and win in this space. They needed a product to combat the gains that Flash is making as well. I downloaded Silverlight tonight for the first time (been meaning to all week and just haven't gotten around to it) and tried out a couple of the samples - the http://www.silverlight.net/fox one was particularly cool. I was amazed at the quality of the streaming and the smoothness of it - my ancient laptop generally doesn't handle all very well and it worked great. The install was amazingly painless and light as well.
I am also very excited about the .NET support in it and as soon as I get the replacement motherboard for my main machine I am going to update to Orcas Beta 1 and install the dev extensions and try developing against Silverlight.
