You might wonder what this confuzzled is. It’s a word I heard in a movie or in a TV series (don’t remember exactly where) as a combination of confused and puzzled. Cool isn’t it ? But it perfectly suits the current situation of the Silverlight.

Silverlight is a good platform, no one can deny that. MS released it as a RIA plugin for the web. (initially to battle against Adobe Flash and Java FX) then Microsoft realized that HTML 5 is  great and started the promising of open web.

They started campaigning Silverlight is not meant for the web. At that time Mango was in a hype. So Silverlight got a safe shelter under the Mango tree.

Microsoft also announced the Lightswitch, which is based on Silverlight. (out of the browser feature).

Lightswitch has its own attention from some ISV’s and has been growing, but not much popular in a broader market. Though it is a pleasing platform to develop applications deployment of a Lightswitch app is little hard.

But now Silverlight got a very serious problem. It doesn’t know where to go and where to exactly fit in ? Because of the new boss – WinRT.

We all know that Windows 8 apps are running on top of WinRT, and the Windows phone 8 is also a WinRT platform. No more  Silverlight in Windows phone.

Poor Silverlight it lost one of its major safe houses.

So as of now Lightswitch is the only guaranteed place for Silverlight to rest in peace.

But you might wonder still we use the XAML in WinRT, so how come we loss the Silverlight. XAML is a powerful UI standard created for WPF and then ported to Silverlight and now being used in WinRT.

So still you can use the XAML skills you’ve got on layout, user interaction, data binding and so and so in the WinRT, but Silverlight is no longer there. That’s it.

So what about the existing WP7 (Mango) apps written in Silverlight, MS promised an automatic recompile of the apps in the marketplace to WinRT.

And since XAML is there, Silverlight devs no need to panic much, because they can still use the XAML and other features like Command model, Converter model and other patterns in WinRT. ( I think the dependency property is still there, not so sure)

Silverlight also has the promises of BI 2.0 but again in a very limited scope. In SQL Server 2012 the power view has some sort of a Silverlight touch.

So when calculating all the formulas, I think Silverlight 5 would be the last version.