This weekend I was doing what I think developers ought to do, especially if, like me, they love new technology and the struggles of software projects more than the actual programming itself. I was seeing what I could learn about Orcas and Silverlight without actually installing the monstrous, 8-part download for Orcas Beta1. If you followed the Orcas link you'll notice that you'll have to deal with some 5 GB of downloads, only to install and perhaps find that the IDE wreaks havoc with VS 2005.

I found Microsoft's MixOnline site, which has a nice search utility to find presentations and keynotes, and quickly found what I was looking for. John Lam and Jim Hugunin, creators of RubyCLR and IronPython, respectively, gave an entertaining and impressive talk on Silverlight and the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime). They demoed javascript, ruby, python and C# code all intermingled and talking to each other seamlessly! This link shows the talk in a Silverlight media player and requires a quick download. Enjoy...

After watching, you can check out this article from the Atlantic to get some perspective on just how far we've come in 20 years. I didn't read the entire article, but it speaks admiringly of "hard disks" costing several thousand dollars than can store "from two or three on up to several dozen megabytes".