This is interesting. Just the other day I saw a flash ad on Reddit touting all the new features in Visual Studio 2010. I was surprised to see that one of the slides mentioned "Support for including the jQuery Framework".
Glad to see that riding the jQuery train rather than making their own or something along those lines.
Irregardless of MS's support of Moonlight, I question the entire effort. Wouldn't those talented programmer be put to better use on something with a higher chance of actually being used?
I actually really dig mono and in my mind those resources would serve the community better focused on Mono, MonoDevelop, MonoTouch and MonoDroid.
I just don't see wide-scale adoption of Silverlight/Moonlight whether it's available on *nix or not, with or with MS's blessing.
There was a goal (a while back) of getting Moonlight embedded in Firefox (on all platforms). The goal hasn't come true but think about that. A general purpose VM embedded right in the browser!
I have no doubt that Moonlight would be used if it was embedded within the browser. CIL is an open-specification, we already have many compilers that target it. We could run C#, Scala, Java, Python, Ruby, Haskell, etc on the client side.
But all we're stuck with is a JavaScript VM to use.
I think the fact that this thread has only the two of us interested sums of the interest in Silverlight/Moonlight in the hacker community. ;)
I guess I wonder why I would want to write C#, Scala, etc on the clientside? Javascript is an already established cross-browser standard that I'd say any good developer is already familiar with; certainly jQuery strengthens the case for JS and also is bringing more people into the fold.
And with Node.js - which clearly has a lot of interest in the HN community (node.js stories always get upvoted as well they should) - it seems that things are moving in the opposite direction from what moonlight/ms is trying to accomplish with this particular tech.
For all those reasons it just seems like a fools errand to me.
Glad to see that riding the jQuery train rather than making their own or something along those lines.