Think Apple’s iPad is a consumer platform? Think again. I’m at the Cloudforce conference in London; and the level of iPad visibility has been striking.

A Silverlight application is a .NET application. Most developers will be aware of this; but it is worth noting that whereas ASP.NET code executes on the server and is not normally available for download, Silverlight code is downloaded to the client and can easily be decompiled. It is almost as easy to view as JavaScript code in the browser.

If you want to investigate this, the first thing to do is to find the .xap file which contains the Silverlight application. You will likely find this in your browser cache, or you can download it directly from the web site hosting the application. If you have out-of-browser Silverlight apps, they are usually located at:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\LocalLow\Microsoft\Silverlight\OutOfBrowser

Copy the .xap file somewhere convenient, and rename it to have a .zip extension. Then extract the files. The result looks something like this:

...

I ran into this issue today and it’s the second time this has burned me. It didn’t take as long to figure out this time, but hopefully typing this up will ingrain it into my brain further.

Microsoft’s Brad Becker, Director of Product Management for Developer Platforms, has defended the role of Silverlight in the HTML 5 era

SapphireSteel Software is poised to release Amethyst, which lets you develop Flash and Flex applications with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 or 2010.

I had a chat with Jay Schmelzer and  Doug Seven from the Visual Studio LightSwitch team. I asked about the release date – no news yet.

Microsoft has announced a new edition of Visual Studio called LightSwitch, now available in beta, and it is among the most interesting development tools I’ve seen.

A comment here points me to this comparison by Decebal Mihailescu of start-up times for processes on Windows using different runtimes: .NET in several versions, Java 1.6, Mono 2.6.4, and Visual C++ 2010 (native code).

A number of blogs are running a coordinated poll on what users would most like to see in the next version of Windows. The results so far are unsurprising but still worth repeating, since there is a good chance that they differ from Microsoft’s priorities.



Note that users are less concerned about new features, more concerned about an OS that works better and faster.

Less bloat, currently number five in the list, will be hard to achieve while PC vendors still insist in bundling poor quality add-ons with their systems.

If you want to vote you can do so at any of various blogs including 4sysops – which has some notes expanding...

Oracle is suing Google over Java in Android; the Register has a link to the complaint itself which lists seven patents which Oracle claims Google has infringed.