There is a lot of chatter on the Silverlight Forums (http://silverlight.net/forums) about the lack of synchronous behavior with some of the .NET BCL that is included. It has made a number of people angry and unhappy.  I wanted to venture an opinion about this.

I think that supporting only asynchronous behavior is the right approach. If you’ve done much client-side web development, you’ve probably accidently created a tight-looping JavaScript code knows that it is frightfully easy to lockup the browser.

It might be easy to say that Microsoft is protecting developers from themselves, but I don’t think its that simple. The problem is that Silverlight 2 is going against a very mature platform from Adobe. If Silverlight 2 applications give the ‘impression’ of locking up the browser, Microsoft will be blamed and the platform will get a black eye.  The press clippings will be about Microsoft, not the application developer.  So I think its fair that Microsoft create a platform to create browser applications that don’t interfere with the natural operation of the browser. Sure its harder, but we’re tough…right?

What do you think?