I don’t know why I respond to so many ill-informed bloggers posts about Silverlight…but I do. Something about their ill-inform-ed-ness just gets me all riled up.

Dave Methvin’s article “Windows 7 Phone: Hail Mary” showed up on my Google Alerts for Silverlight. I was hoping to read an informed opinion about Microsoft’s mobile…err…sorry…”Phone” strategy. But unfortunately I found Dave Methvin up to his old tricks. Let me summarize the article:

Using Silverlight is scary and unstable because you are somewhere between Silverlight 3 and 4. Visual Studio 2010 is yet to be released, hence unproven and risky. Yeah, HENCE. Dave is dismayed that Microsoft doesn’t just give up all this proprietary Silverlight rubbish and go with an existing standard. Of course HTML5 (and crew). Silverlight doesn’t allow developers to reuse their existing knowledge.

My responses:

Silverlight 4 is in public beta. Obviously we are somewhere in between 3 and 4. Duh. VS2010 is the 10th generation version of Visual Studio. Unproven? Now this is getting just plain silly. HTML5 an “existing standard”? Well, if by existing you mean work-in-progress and by “standard” you mean Google-Apple secret alliance. OK, yeah, I guess I could believe that. WOW. Ever hear of .NET? C#? VB? Yikes. Are you sure you should be tackling this topic and trying to sound authoritative and objective?

Dave is just trying to spread fear and doubt about Microsoft’s phone platform, cloud platform, UI platform, pretty much everything to people who don’t know any better or already share his pre-conceived notions.

So, Dave, I am here to offer a dissenting view and a little advice: do some research before you get on your soap box.