Spicing up user experience w/ Silverlight – Tech Session, Day 2

This session was probably the biggest disappointment of the conference so far… not that I really have a lot of high hopes for Microsoft’s RIA framework, but this was just ridiculous.  The speaker was not an employee of MS, so I’ll cut her some slack… but if her attitude towards the framework is any indication of the real motives behind Microsoft creating Silverlight then they simply don’t get it.  Several times the speaker repeated the line “isn’t this cool!?” to the room full of dead quiet developers.  Some guy spoke up, “Doesn’t Flash already do this?”.  Yea, it’s basically exactly like Flash, except maybe more like Flash 4.  She was all excited about the drag-and-drop controls, most of which do already exist in flash (graphing, sliders, etc).  A lot of people, including myself, jumped out of there a few minutes early…