Why should I use Silverlight?

Great question!

I consider myself an application developer, not an artist. Good web design is 10% programming and 90% art work. Since I'm not an artist, I'm really not interested in doing web design.

What I am interested in is building applications that run over the Internet.

In response to competition from Adobe Flash, Microsoft has finally given us a tool that allows us to do just that - deliver windows applications over the Internet without having to install the application locally.

I've been working with Silverlight for several months now. Here is what I like:
1. It is reliable - I have run into my share of difficulties, but I have been able to work through all of them. I have every confidence that what I publish to the Internet will work once everything is tested.

2. It is fast - see my other posts for lessons learned with architecture. The architecture I have setup is smoking fast.

3. It uses the Microsoft toolset - though Silverlight is quite a bit different from ASP.NET, the underlying language is the same. I use C# for the language, (though you could use any .NET language), and WCF for communicating back and forth between the client and the database on the server. Because Silverlight leverages a toolset I am already skilled in, it was easy for me to pick it up.

The one thing I don't like about Silverlight is that when things don't work, it can go South in a hurry and the error messages are often cryptic. I've dealt with this by adding error handling and defensive code.