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Before I begin, rush out and download this thing right now. Here's the link.
As you probably know, Silverlight is Microsoft's new RIA technology platform. It purports to provide a single development platform that will allow you to deploy WPF-like rich applications to multiple operating systems through multiple browsers. For example, you can write your XAML and C# and deploy that to a server which can then be consumed by people using IE on Windows Vista or people using Safari on OS X (Tiger only right now, Leopard support is forthcoming).
On the other hand, Astoria is another new project from Microsoft. Astoria allows you to build things called "Data services". Basically it takes an Entity Data Model representation of your database and exposes that model through RESTy URLs and sending and receiving raw XML. As you know, RESTy POX is just one of those things that makes me happy and furthers my goal of world-wide destruction of all WSDL :) Astoria also includes a client library that allows you to access the Astoria services programmatically and not have to worry about all the serialization and de-serialization, etc. In short, it's pure crack for those of us who like spending our time in the data tier or middleware tiers.
Now... what do you get when you provide a client library for Astoria that can be referenced and used from within a Silverlight application? Pure. RIA. Goodness. Later today, I'm hoping to have some code samples and screenshots. I just finished downloading the client library and now all I need to do is make a database, make a data service, and then create a Silverlight application and hope to <diety/> that the cross-domain restrictions don't make this development environment completely unusable.
I'll let you know how it goes.
What exactly is one downloading when he loads one of these pages in his
browser? a .NET assembly?
When you hit a page that loads a Silverlight app, you are loading a browser
plugin that contains a miniature version of the CLR, running natively on
whatever platform you're using. In the case of OS X, the plugin is written
natively for the Mac and it runs a mini version of the CLR.
This miniature version of the CLR is then used to JIT the code downloaded
by the Silverlight app, which converts it into machine code usable by that
platform. This miniature version of the CLR, in combination with the
downloaded code, XAML, and resources, then runs like a small application
within the bounds of the Silverlight control.
I think something key here to note is that even on Windows, Silverlight
_does not_ use the full version of the .NET Framework. It uses the same
lightweight, portable version of the CLR and subset of the BCL that is used
by all of the platforms on which Silverlight can work... which now includes
Linux thanks to the herculean hacking efforts of the Mono team.
