If you don’t mind downloading 5 Gb of Visual Studio 8.0 Beta, which is needed to build the samples.

Comparing to previous CTP releases of WPF/e Silverlight 1.1 Alpha sounds like a revolution (RIA is no longer Adobe’s party). Here is what we’ve got:

• Cross platform .NET subset implementation, which allows to run C#, Python, Ruby, JScript and VB.NET compiled code inside the browser (IE, Firefox or Safari)
• DLR (Dynamic language runtime) capable to execute scripting code on the client including Python, JScript and Ruby. I understand that more languages can be added as plug-ins, which sounds fantastic. This ultimately ends the monopoly of JavaScript as the only client side scripting language for the web
• People say it’s fast and the runtime is 4 Mb only
• Silverlight has access to complete DOM of browser’s document, while on the other side you can expose selected classes from your CLR code to document’s JavaScript
• It adds many things missed from earlier releases, including ZIndex support and GUI Controls
• In fact now it’s fairly easy to implement any controls you like using C#

This is my favorite sample so far — IronPython, JavaScript and XAML console implemented on IronPython. It has syntax highlighting and code auto-competition already so I guess it won’t take long until we see complete IDE running inside the browser!

I’ll be testing 1.1 soon and will report on performance (comparing to earlier CTP and Flex) and ease of use. I hope there is (will be) an alternate way to build Silverlight applications, which doesn’t require the use of Visual Studio.