Silverlight 1.1 Alpha
Microsoft made a pretty major announcement today at Mix 07.
They announced that the 1.1 version of Silverlight would contain a cross-platform implementation of the .NET framework, allowing Silverlight applications to be written in any .NET language and still run on all platforms (though it appears that right now it's just Windows and Mac OS X).
Why is this important? It's important for two reasons primarily (that I've been able to ascertain so far):
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The .NET languages are powerful and familiar - there are millions of people developing apps in C# and VB.NET (not to mention IronPython, IronRuby, C++/CLI, etc) for several existing platforms - Windows (Windows Forms), the Web (ASP.NET) and other platforms (the Mono Project). This is just one more way for developers to create powerful applications using a language they are familiar with. Microsoft knew what they were doing when they announced .NET, we just weren't quite ready for it.
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The previous way for you to "program" a Silverlight application was to use Javascript. I read a blog this morning (thought I can't find it at the moment - if I find it later, I'll post again) that said that the same application performing a task in Javascript and in .NET showed that .NET was orders of magnitude better than Javascript. That alone is reason enough.
I haven't had a chance to give any of this a try from the developer's side (or plain old WPF for that matter). But it appears to be something incredible happening here and I am looking forward to giving it a shot!