I was reading Shawn Wildermuth and John Papa's blog posts about all of the tools that they use for Silverlight development, and it finally pushed me to put a thought that's been rattling around in my brain into words.

Last weekend I was at the Art & Code conference at CMU in Pittsburg presenting, along with Tim Hibner, an introduction to Silverlight. Being in that environment reminded me of what it was like when I was a student and was looking at various programming languages. One of the things I was interested in doing back then was developing video games. I remember looking into Flash programming and was turned off by the cost of the development environment. To be honest, that was a while ago and I don't remember what the costs were, but I do remember the feeling that I couldn't bother with the hassle of learning the platform.

Developing video games like today's casual Flash games is a huge opportunity for an entry point to learning Silverlight. Just look at all of the Flash game sites out there. There are actually some Silverlight specific game sites getting started now like Silver Arcade and Silverlight Club. In fact, there is currently a Silverlight game development contest with a grand prize of $5000, which should definitely get people interested.

The first place people interested to start with Silverlight are pointed to is the Get Started page on the official Silverlight web site. This page starts out by linking to the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, which in turn requires you to already have Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Web Developer Express installed with Service Pack 1. Assuming the user downloads the Visual Web Developer Express, they have a joy filled hour+ of baby sitting installs. Then, the second step is to download and install the Expression Blend 2 trial, and download and install the Expression Blend 2 Service Pack 1 on top of that. Gah! It goes on from there.

I'm seriously wondering how many people make it that far, or have given up at this point. I think the final straw for me would have been the fact that Blend is only a 30 day trial. What do I do after that? Pay $499 for Expression Blend or $999 for Expression Studio? No way! Even as a professional developer today I wouldn't pay that. And, sure, there's DreamSpark, but that's an extra hassle, and the get started page doesn't even mention it.

I love Silverlight, but its been easy for me since I've been developing on the Microsoft platform for over 10 years and I have access to MSDN downloads. Thank goodness for the fact that Blend is available through that, or else no one would bother with it.

Microsoft has done a great job with making free versions of its tools available lately, but for all the weight they're putting behind Silverlight I don't understand why they don't, at the very least, have an Express version of Blend. I would even suggest that there should be a free version of the entire Expression Suite, although a name like Expression Suite Express is kinda silly.