Real Silverlight Support on Windows Embedded Compact 7?

Question

So Windows Embedded Compact 7 (another classic from the naming department) supports Silverlight for Windows Embedded.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/products/windowsce/compact7.mspx But this is a C++ only stripped down version of Silverlight 2 XAML.

Does anybody know if Windows Embedded Compact 7 will support real Silverlight? This seems to be out of step with Windows Phone (which I think is based on Windows CE 6) and the fact that Windows Embedded Compact 7 supports Flash 10.1.

Answer 1

Not in the first release, no, it will not support managed Silverlight (or, IMO, what the entire world considers to be "Silverlight").

They may, at some point, move the work done by the Phone team to create a managed SL implementation, but they've made no announcements as to if or when that might ever occur.

Answer 2

You'll see "Developers,Developers" Balmer come out later like he has done before and admit they made a mistake with this. Its the developers that produce the apps and if you make all the microsoft technologies linq, wpf, ria and patterns such as MVVM unuasable developers won't trust you and move to another platform. They dropped the ball on the Phone OS by not having a great consumer oriented phone. Now they will focus on consumers stick it to the business developers that they had built up on Windows Mobile. They did a great job with the silverlight 4 so I don't understand how they can drop the ball this badly on Compact 7.

Answer 3

I agree about the non-uniform development environment, but you should also consider that the processor that are currently powering WP7 devices are not still available on the general embedded market where 1GHz processors are a small minority and 5-600MHz processors are used only for hi-end devices. Trying to run both the XAML and the .NET runtime could lead to weak performances and disappointing results. If you need RAD, use the Compact Framework. If you need cool UI, use Silverlight for Windows Embedded. You can't have both right now, as you can on the phone...