Silverlight was announced yesterday at Mix 07. The reactions from press, analysts, and bloggers has been extremely positive. Scoble says "Microsoft rebooted the web". Dan Farber of ZDnet has a great collection of quotes from industry gurus and pundits...all positive. Steve Gillmor, a frequent Microsoft critic was positive as well. Steve said

The engineering behind this is stunning. This is no Hailstorm, no crash dive all-hands-on-deck save the cheerleader, save the company drive from the Gates playbook. This is a Microsoft 3.0 iteration, with Visual Studio and Firefox tied at the waist.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was really impressed.

"For those of us watching the demos at the Mix conference the immediate importance of it was apparent - Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications. It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy. After the keynote, the main topic of conversation in the hallways centered on just how effectively Microsoft carried out its execution of Adobe."

It is very unusual for all these A-List people to be so positive on a new product. These guys are tough critics so when they get excited...that is good news for developers and designers.

You really have to see Silverlight and Microsoft Expression in action to get a real sense of what it can do. the demos are mind blowing. There are very deep and powerful capabilities in both products...far more than could be shown in a few quick demos.

Silverlight and Expression play to Microsoft's strength...software tools. Developers have Visual Studio, designers have Expression, and they both work together. Silverlight is the deployment runtime environment that supports the major platforms and browsers. The performance and capabilities are amazing.

A great day for designers and developers. Visit Silverlight.Net to see what everyone is talking about.