This afternoon I happened across a CodeProject article on creating the Sierpinski Triangle in Silverlight. It looked interesting enough, and I haven’t played much with Silverlight, so it sounded like a match made in heaven.
I started first by clicking the demo link, which led me to the “Download Silverlight” icon. The problem? I thought I had Silverlight installed already. So I headed over to the Silverlight site. Have you been there? It took me nearly 3 minutes to get to the download page because stuff was jumping around, twirling and refreshing. And then, when I did get to the download page, it came up saying “Click here to install” but before I got the chance to, the page zoomed away and was replaced with a “Congratulations for installing Silverlight” page, which linked to a test page. So, assuming that I was right and did have it installed, I clicked over.
Unfortunately, the test – whether some image was moving – was just a white box. So I clicked that I couldn’t see the image was moving and proceeded to go through the download/fly away/congrats page/test page loop a couple of times. After the 4th time landing on the test page, I was pondering what to do next when suddenly an image showed up and started moving. Ah! I guess that a) I had to wait for the image to download (without any clue and b) I did have Silverlight installed. So I went back to the demo page – but no luck.
Then I saw that the download image on the demo page had a little “Alpha” banner on it. Ah! They must want Silverlight 1.1. So I head back over to the Silverlight site and download the 1.1 installer. Everything is going fine when – poof – my IE windows disappear. All of ’em. Shocked and amazed, I sat there slightly stunned until suddenly IE popped back up and reloaded all of the windows and tabs I had opened. Well, I’m sure glad that it felt it was perfectly Ok to just restart my browser without warning or permission.
So everything should be hunky dory, right? Nope – I head back to the demo site, and all I see is the “Get Microsoft Silverlight” image. Unfortunately, SQL is finished installing on my other machine now, so there went the chance to try out Silverlight.
Funny, I don’t remember having these problems with Flash. Not even in Linux. Oh well. Maybe some other day.