To be fair, it should be a lot less expansive to get a complex UI running for 90% of a typical user base with silverlight, provided that your business model allows you to ignore the fsf crowd. In the context of those touchy-feely applications for windows 8, it is a hysterically stupid move to force developers into the web stack, and then tell them to go fuck themselves and port the whole shit to Silverlight for WP7 devices. It is really less "cross platform", considered what platforms those devs care about.
I can think of very few reasons for this idiocy besides relations between OS and devtools devision having quietly deteriorated from post WWII style peace to nuclear war.
The platforms that I, when doing .NET development, care about are:
-Windows
-Windows Phone
-Xbox 360 (for games)
And maybe Linux if I'm feeling really charitable and want to make my stuff Mono-compatible.
JavaScript is not a first-class language on at least two of those platforms. It's not a cross-platform application development language on three of them.
>“Microsoft has first class cross-platform application framework called Silverlight and they want us to right freaking javascript.”
Yeh, because js isn't a first class, cross platform language...