[forgotAgain]

From its initial introduction Silverlight was Microsoft's response to Flash. It's development was a business strategy rather than the next step in the evolution of a programming paradigm.

If you accept that very few if any mobile apps are being developed/sold now with either Flash or Silverlight then you have to accept that the future of those technologies are in question.

The only thing that we can be certain of is that any decisions on the future of Silverlight will be based on a business strategy. The repercussions to developers from any decisions made will be of little or no significance to those making the decisions.

[browniepoints]

Microsoft has over 20000 apps on the Windows Phone 7 market place...I don't know the exact mix between Silverlight vs. XNA (the two frameworks that you can target WP7 with) but I'd feel safe betting that at least 75 percent are Silverlight. 15000 apps is hardly what I'd call very few.

[Tyrant505]

Can you point to the real "showstoppers" on this platform for comparison to other apps on iOS/Android?

[browniepoints]

First are the apps that are built in to the device. The Zune Media Player coupled with a Zunepass lets you download almost any song in the library directly to the device. I've been able to consistently name a song, look it up on the zune marketplace and listen to it 30 seconds later.

The Office hub integrates with Sharepoint Online allowing you to collaborate on documents from your phone. Make annotations etc. Included in this is OneNote which becomes a portable notebook.

The Games hub has full Xbox live integration with games from the major publishers made specifically for the phone.

Facebook and Twitter both have multiple clients both "Official" and third party.

Netflix, Kindle, Youtube, and a number of other major media outlets have native clients.

4th and Mayor is a foursquare app that was written as an example app by a member of Microsoft's platform evangelism team (http://www.4thandmayor.com/)

So far there hasn't been a case where I wanted an app to do something on my phone and couldn't find multiple examples both free and paid. The ecosystem is very robust. Microsoft just released tools to simplify porting apps from iOS and Android so it's only going to grow from there.

[forgotAgain]

What I wrote was very few were being developed/sold.

[browniepoints]

WP7 was just released last fall. 20000 apps have been developed in 7 months.

[junklight]

This strategy worked out really well for C# as a response to Java. At first it seemed just like a spoiling move but somewhere a long the way c# turned into the better language.

So you can't blame them for giving the strategy another whirl

[browniepoints]

Funny story, the original plan was to use Java as the premier .NET language. Then Sun got all litigious and ish. So MSFT made their own. They have the benefit of having full control of C# good thing too. Look at what Oracle is doing to Google over Android.