I talked about my frustration with Silverlight to a couple of people at the recent tri-state community mixer and heard the same thing several times: “I wish I could come up with a project to try Silverlight.” This goes to reinforce my opinion that Silverlight is being pitched to the wrong audience (developers) with the wrong message (“Rich media experience for the masses”).

sIFR + Silverlight

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you may remember .IR — an image replacement technique I derived from sFIR which allowed you to embed Flash with an arbitrary font in place of plain vanilla Arial/Helvetica/Verdana headings. Instead of Flash I used an image-streaming HttpHandler that utilized GDI+. Maximilian Beller even created a server control out of .IR, and Carl Camera kicked it up a notch and came up with ViPR.

Back then I left .IR in beta even though I’ve used it on this site (view this page in a browser to see for yourselves) ever since. I’ve grown sick of endless betas since then. If I put out anything these days, it’s at least ver. 1.0.

It occurred to me that the same technique should be doable and even more flexible with Silverlight. Not surprisingly, it’s already in the works! Filipe Fortes seems to be working on Sistr (sIFR + Silverlight) which you can see in action here. Good stuff! Gotta keep an eye on this development.