Kurt Shintaku's Blog

According to GigaOm, Silverlight will be the framework upon which applications will be developers for the Xbox 360 when Microsoft releases the November 2011 dashboard update which provides a new Xbox App Marketplace:

We’ve confirmed that the apps expected to be added with the next major update to Xbox Live will be based on Silverlight — at least to a point. The framework they’re being built on is codenamed “Lakeview”, which is essentially a prettied up version of Silverlight with new features like Xbox Kinect’s voice recognition and gesture control. Surprisingly enough, partners are not using Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming for video delivery, but have chosen to use H.264-encoded video with Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) instead.

[taken from GigaOm]

This is in addition to the 30,000 applications written & published for Windows Phone 7 that are ENTIRELY based on either Silverlight & XNA:

If you have Silverlight and C# experience, you are significantly prepared to build applications on Windows Phone 7, but the fact of the matter is, the phone is very different device from the PC, with limited battery life, poor network connectivity, different performance characteristics, smaller screens, and wildly different input mechanisms like touch and accelerometer. All of these factors need to be considerations in phone software development from the very beginning, when designing your end user experience.

These principles were at the front of people’s minds here while designing and building Windows Phone 7. They were also in the front of the minds of the folks who built the new Windows Phone 7 version of Silverlight. In order for you to build outstanding, high performance applications in Silverlight, you’ll need to understand the steps that were taken to optimize the Silverlight runtime on Windows Phone, and take advantage of defined characteristics like the discrete GPU, (required on every Windows Phone 7 device). To better do so, we’ve published the following resources:

• A video interview with Shane Guillet, Test Lead of the Silverlight team, available on Channel 9 at: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Inside+Windows+Phone/Inside-Windows-Phone-03-Optimizing-Windows-Phone-Silverlight-applications/
• A full white paper, complete with code samples, documenting strategies and best practices, available for download at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3a8636bf-185f-449a-a0ce-83502b9ec0ec. Rohan Thakkar, a PM on the Silverlight team, has also posted the full text of this paper on his blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rohantha/archive/2010/09/09/optimizing-silverlight-applications-for-windows-phone-7.aspx. The entire article will be online in the MSDN Library shortly.

[taken from the Windows Team Blog & MSDN]

Interesting for a supposedly “dead” platform.