Silverlight 1.1 is a new technology from Microsoft that includes a “light” version of the .NET Framework so as to allow rich client applications.

 

This kind of application could very well have been written with the “regular” .NET technology (WinForms, ClickOnce) but for reasons of pride and prejudice it never caught on.

 

Anyway, hail Silverlight. We are delivered.

 

Now that Silverlight is hot, an interesting phenomenon is happening: people want to write cool Silverlight applications, but the current implementation is quite limited. But it seems that from a Silverlight application you can “jump” into a full WinForms application. This seems to be what this folks have done:

 

http://www.goasoft.com/products/default.aspx. Quoting from their site: “The WinFormHost element is used to display the forms created using the System.Windows.Forms namespace”. So it seems that all they have is a “Silverlight-to-WinForms” bridge.

 

This is not such a bad idea, since most Windows installations already have .NET installed. It will be interesting to see the “old” GUI technology being resurrected by the new. Of course, Microsoft itself might provide this “feature”.