Are you insane? I've had to develop a CRUD application in Silverlight, and it was dauntingly slow in comparison to Ruby and Python frameworks, and the tooling is still behind the rest of the C# frameworks.

I made a blog post a few weeks ago on the matter: http://www.andresosinski.com.ar/blog_view_entry/?id=6

Well, 3 points:

1) in most of your post you argue against the performance of VS2010 and how slow it is to edit XAML, not the performance of your Silverlight code/application. I take that it was as good as mine. And I think that this is what is being discussed here.

2) I agree that VS2010 is indeed much slower than previous versions, although I didn't experience something as terrible as you. But I am running it in a 3GHz quad-core with 4Gb of RAM, so...

3) Silverlight is a WEB client solution and that's the scope of this discussion and the post I answered. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think frameworks like Django and Rails are server-side technologies and, as such, don't compare to Flash and HTML5, and are out of scope for this discussion, right?

Partially so. However much Silverlight might fill a niche for rich media, the fact is that 99% of the use cases will be for internal business applications, where it fails spectacularly. And in the case of ubiquitous media apps, it's simple: Siverlight is not nor will it ever be ubiquitous.

IMO the fact that Silverlight hasn't been canned is just another point that shows that MS doesn't get it. When they saw where HTML5 was going they should have jumped on board with both feet. It's too late to force everyone to use their OS at this point so they should have been focused on being compatible with everyone but simply running better.

Silverlight will get a bit bigger but it's never going to matter in the long term, any more than Java applets ever will.

The cynic in me thinks that MS thought that rather than spending energy to "get it" and maybe failing, they could back all horses and see who would win. They usual strategy (and Google's current m.o. sadly).