Is Silverlight dead (or still alive)?

Is Silverlight dead or still alive, that’s the question of some developers, companies, project managers,… today.

Since Microsoft announced that Silverlight 5 is the last version of Silverlight there are many speculations that everyting is going to html 5…

In my opinion (at this moment :)), I don’t think that html 5 is an alternative for Silverlight 5…
Some of my arguments:

• At this time html 5 is NOT cross browser, some features works in IE and some others in FireFox an so on, Silverlight 5 runtime is supported on IE, FireFox, Safari and Chrome (not officialy Opera).
• I saw on TechDays 2012 that Microsoft uses Silverlight for his own products, some examples: Azure Management Console and Microsoft Intune.
• Microsoft supports Silverlight 5 till 10/12/2021 (see here).

Last but not least, on Windows 8, you can build Metro applications, you can use your existing Silverlight skills (XAML + C#) for building these applications because the XAML for building the UI is the same (syntax, default controls,…) as in Silverlight applications.
For the HTML/CSS/JavaScript developers there is also support for this languages in Windows 8 for building Metro applications. For more information about building Metro applications, I suggest to look on the official Microsoft website, you can find there a lot of tutorials and example code.

Another interesting read of ‘The Future Of Silverlight’.

Do you have an other opinion (or the same :)) about the future of Silveright, feel free to write it down in a comment on this blog post!