Martin answers a few questions about his review of Silverlight 2 I thought I was being clear in my review of Silverlight, but let me spell out the answers to a few of the questions that have come up in comments.Q: Do you think that Silverlight is the heir apparent to Flex?A: No. I don’t think that Silverlight is a “Flash killer” or a “Flex killer.” It’s a worthy alternative to those technologies. Some percentage of Flex developers may eventually want to try Silverlight projects, especially if runtime compute speed is an issue, but mostly I see Silverlight developers coming primarily from the ranks of WPF developers. Or maybe it’ll be the other way around at some point, and more developers will adopt WPF after learning Silverlight. Q: Should I worry about the security and privacy of Silverlight because it’s from Microsoft?A: I wouldn’t sweat it, if you also run Flash — and most people do run Flash.Flash 10 and Silverlight 2 are both brand-new, so neither one has any proven security flaws at this point. On the other hand, the security of previous versions of Flash hasn’t been great, as evidenced by this listing of the Secunia vulnerabilities and advisories of Flash by version: Flash Player 9.x (31 vulnerabilities, 7 Secunia advisories)https://secunia.com/advisories/product/11901/Flash Player 8.x (21 vulnerabilities, 6 Secunia advisories)https://secunia.com/advisories/product/6153/Flash Player 7.x (22 vulnerabilities, 8 Secunia advisories)https://secunia.com/advisories/product/2634/Flash Player 6.x (1 vulnerability, 5 Secunia advisories)https://secunia.com/advisories/product/773/Flash Player 5.x (0 vulnerabilities, 3 Secunia advisories) [earliest version tracked]https://secunia.com/advisories/product/392/Even though Flash 5.x had 0 vulnerabilities, it did have three “advisories.” For example, Secunia had issues with its handling of cookies, and issued an “advisory.” “If privacy is crucial to anonymise your users, we recommend that you un-install Macromedia Flash or filter Flash content via a proxy and only allow Flash from trusted sites.”https://secunia.com/advisories/7245/Some of the advisories for Flash 9.x are equally harsh. This one has only been “partially fixed,” which implies that Flash 9.x is still insecure:https://secunia.com/advisories/32270/Microsoft cleaned up its act about making software secure a few years ago when it adopted SDL. The developers I know there take security very seriously.Q: Chainsaws and axes?A: Don’t read too much into that. I happen to like axes. Compared to chainsaws, they are quiet and precise, at least in skilled hands. Tool selection is a matter of what you like and can use efficiently for the purpose at hand. Software Development