This is all being built next to Oslo's Fjords....

No wonder Slartibartfast won an award for them!

As a Java developer who has over the last couple of years taken a tour of the different RIA frameworks, I find Silverlight fantastic.

Flash, if you're a designer is awesome. But personally, as a developer, I found the environment pretty basic compared to server side java. Flex Builder is kind of crappy(at least as of 6 months ago), lacking many features even free Eclipse-based tools provide (such as meaningful refactoring). And the programming api outside the gui toolkit is only skin deep. And, which really makes me sad, no eval() in the runtime.

Meanwhile, with .Net/Silverlight, you've got oodles of libs, a pretty decent IDE, tons of great books, and REALLY NEAT projects like the DLR(which is a way to get eval() in this environment, and a whole lot more). Plus, eventually, you'll be able to run full SL apps on your phone with windows mobile 6 + Symbian. For this working developer whose resources are constrained by time and money, this sounds like a real coup.

Love Microsoft or hate it, Moonlight/Silverlight is something devs should be excited about.

I also hope Adobe learns from it for future versions of Flex/Flash, continuing to drive innovation.

Back in the old days(and still now) is that most compilers compiled to a intermediate language-often C.
So what this really means is that (sometime soon)we'll be able to write in any language that can be compiled down to C...so Lisp, C++, Objective-C, welcome to the browser!