So I went to go re-watch Scott Guthrie's video illustrating the new upcoming MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for ASP.NET when I noticed that the content is in Silverlight. That's fine, MS is trying so hard to push Silverlight as the answer to the world's problems that it's probably a requirement that all new content from MS come out as Silverlight content. Whatever, I can cope.... normally.

However... today I couldn't see the content. Why? Because I got a message that looks like this:

Ok fine, I can accep that somehow my Silverlight plug-in has expired or is no longer valid. But, isn't part of the beauty of Silverlight that it automatically updates itself like Flash has always done??? Oh.. I guess not. So, I'll just copy the URL and paste it into my browser and be done....WHAT?! The text in the dialog box is uncopyable. I can't select it. So, I have to type. the url. manually.

Then when I get to the URL, guess what I see? An error message indicating that my version of Silverlight plug-in is no longer valid and I need to ... *drumroll* .... go to the following URL to fix it!

So now, I am stuck in a scenario in which any Silverlight content I view is simply not rendered (as if it was an unrecognized pile of Javascript by the browser), and I cannot update the plug-in. I realize that Silverlight is still an up and coming technology but... come on... If this is a foreshadowing of the user experience people are going to get when Silverlight makes it prime-time ... what's going to keep developers from just saying to hell with it and using Flex? Well, the fact that Silverlight is .NET but... It would just be nice if Microsoft actually got the user experience right for once. I don't care if it's beautiful, I don't care if it's even smooth, but dammit it should at least WORK.

tags: silverlight  pos
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