Moonlight: Silverlight on Linux

Miguel and his team have been busy - 21 days after Microsoft revealed their cross-platform browser-hosted CLR efforts, the free software world have reimplemented a good junk of it.

• Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days (aka Moonlight)
• Another report of the 21-day hackathon at Novell
• Moonlight-based Desklets
• A Mono Developers Guide to writing XAML by hand. (ie. the language of Silverlight)
• Silverlight Surface demo

Besides the cool tech and the flashy demos, what is very impressive by itself is what can be achieved by a small focused team in a small amount of time. Slow viscosity/inertia/velocity (or whatever you want to call it) is the enemy of innovation. Slow development progress begats further slow progress, whereas quick results sky-rockets the motivation of the team. Seriously, the more projects I see, the more I'm convinced that if you can get the obstacles and interruptions out of the way then you have a great chance to get a coherent, innovative, quality software product developed quickly. It's less about process, it's less about documentation, and it's more about focus.

The hackfest/sprint is certainly under-utilised as a software development lifecycle today.

| 29 Jun 2007 | #