At Mix 09 Microsoft announced that it’s Silverlight product can now run on the desktop for both Windows and Mac. This places the Microsoft offering as a competitor with Adobe AIR.
However upon closer examination the two technologies are coming at the desktop RIA space differently. There have been a lot of confusing reports regarding the Silverlight offering and I wanted to get a more rounded understanding before a rightup. It appears that with Silverlight you can turn any Silverlight web app into a desktop application by selecting a right click menu. Fundamentally it is still running inside the same sandbox as the browser version, however the user does not need to install anything extra (if they already have the Silverlight runtime). Where as AIR requires you to download and install that runtime first before you install any AIR apps.
AIR gives developers more leverage into the users system namely the API’s that make all the cool things possible in AIR, and these are cross platform for Windows, Linux and Mac. It’s going to be interesting as we head to where both vendors are going to be making their solutions available for mobile devices within the coming year.
Update: Ryan Stewart (@ryanstewart) has an excellent write up on the two technologies over at his blog.
