Silverlight 3 will support being deployed offline as desktop apps. That’s cool. It’s official, now, Microsoft has an answer to Adobe AIR. Really cool, actually.

Then again, Silverlight doesn’t do windowing. You’re stuck in a single window. Meh. Silverlight doesn’t do rich menuing (outside of the window canvas, except for right-click context menus). Meh. Silverlight apps deployed to the desktop aren’t actually installed (no true “Application” treatment), just a shortcut on the desktop—a feature (called “simplicity”) as much as a loss. No HTML / Javascript support! Meh!

I’d be no less interested than before of the idea of taking Webkit and building a third party AIR-like solution for Silverlight today even after the Silverlight 3 announcement, if it wasn’t for the annoying fact that even if such a thing was made, people wouldn’t use it, because they’d settle for the half-baked solution from Microsoft.

Do my gladness and disappointment cancel each other out? Hm. Not really. I’m disappointed by the details (or lack thereof), but at the end of it all, if I forget about Adobe AIR for a moment, .. dude! I can deploy simple, User Experience enhanced .NET apps on Windows or Mac with no trouble at all!