This is the email I sent to my team upon leaving on Friday.

Silverlight, baby, sit down, we need to talk.

What’s that you ask? No, no, it’s nothing serious. Well, okay, yeah it’s kind of serious. I need to talk about us.

When we started hanging out a year and a half ago, I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal. You were the new platform in town, and I had to see what you were all about. I figured you’d be up for a good time with no strings attached, you know? But something happened… I really started to fall for you. I found myself up late thinking about you. I was smitten with your rapid release cycles and impressive… feature sets.

But now, well, we want different things. You want to settle down and play it safe. You’re over big refactorings and overengineering. You’re all about schedules and planning and being on time. And trust me, I understand that’s just where you are in your product lifetime. But please understand, that’s not where I am. Wait! Wait, no, I don’t think you’re boring. Really. We’re just… interested in different things.

Darling, please don’t cry. We’ll always be friends. I’m totally going to use you for every RIA app I build. Hell, I’ll even build a mobile app with you later. And just remember the good times. Remember that snowy night when I trekked 3 hours in a blizzard to spend a romantic weekend with you? We integrated forward, reverse, every which way.

But times haven’t always been good, right? Remember OpacityMask? After you hurt me like that, I didn’t know if I could trust you again. You burned me so bad, baby. And let’s not even get into what happened at Taco Town… I thought that was going to be the death of me.

Really, Silverlight? How could you even accuse me of not being loyal? After all we’ve been through. I started using Windows for you! I commuted to Redmond to see you every day. I gave up the STL! Honestly, after all we’ve been through…

But you’re right, there is a reason. It’s not exactly serious yet, but my interest has been peaked by something else. Its name is Startup, and it wants me all to itself now. Startup does whatever I say, and it gets pretty crazy– it’s into test-driven development, agile methods, you name it. It moves fast and I need that excitement again in my life. I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear about that, but this is how I feel.  You’ve taught me so much these past few months and introduced me to so many wonderful friends that I hope we can all continue to be friends.

I really do wish you all the best, and I know you’ll find the person who’s right for you. I think you have 300 excellent candidates right here…

But to be serious for a moment, it’s been really great working with all of you. I’ve enjoyed getting to know everyone on the team, and I certainly hope to stay in touch. It’s not this company or this product that makes this an amazing team– it’s all of you.

The biggest goal I’ve ever had is to start a successful company of my own, and I have to take this chance to try it, especially while I am young and have so little to lose. Thus, this Friday, November 13th, is my last day at Microsoft. I’ll be leaving to launch my own startup.

I’m still going to be in Seattle for the foreseeable future, and I’d certainly like to hear from you guys. I can always be reached at jason.prado@gmail.com.

Sincerely,
Jason

I have set myself a goal of making Silverlight and the DLR the premier method of scripting the web. I love JavaScript, but I love Python more and I like the freedom to choose languages and paradigms most of all.

So I started this afternoon since I bugged out of work early for a doctor’s appointment. I only have a Mac at home, and although I virtualize Vista on my machine I want to do all of this development in OS X since most of the leet haxors I know use OS X.

I was expecting some hassle here for sure. I downloaded and compiled mono, which was a bit of a pain but I basically followed this post. I recommend you just download the dmg instead (more on that later). Then I got the SDK, which is packaged as a separate release until SL 2 is RTW. Turns out starting an app is as simple as this:

> script/sl [ruby|python|jscript] <application_name>
> script/server /b


And a a sample page of your control pops up in your browser, served by the .NET app Chiron. The XAP is generated on the fly. If you’re developing alongside a backend framework like django then just plan to serve your XAP and scripts off of a separate port and everything is easy.

Basically I’m way impressed that this is so easy; the only hiccup I had was that Chiron would mysteriously 500 while trying to generate the XAP. The first thing I tried in order to debug it was switching to the packaged binary of mono instead of the built from trunk version, and it started working immediately. Not a big problem. So stay tuned while I try to develop some traditional webapp building blocks in dynamic languages + Silverlight.

[on an unrelated note, I just noticed that this site looks like ass on IE. sorry about that, I'll fix it as soon as I have time. I just got Vista running at home a few days ago.]

This is interesting. The dude behind Line Rider, the uber popular Flash game, has rewritten the game in Silverlight. Score one for us. I can’t tell if the site sniffs your browser so it might also display a version in Flash, but it’s kind of cool either way. I’m a little suspicious, though, because I think my beneficent employer might have had a hand in this. There’s even integration with Live.com services. I just hope he didn’t mind waking up with a horse head in his bed.

Still not as big of a victory for SL as DeepZoomObama.