What is silverlight good for (yet)?
I have just passed up my first chance to build a silverlight component into a website. It was a tough choice, since everyone involved generally agreed that Silverlight was a great technology and would add a ton of bling to the site.
That being said, it has to be noted that Silverlight does not have a good layout system in place, as it only uses the Canvas layout from WPF - no flow layouts, here folks! This means that you have to position every single element absolutely. And you have to code it in javascript. And there is not built-in project template for it in VS 2008 yet, so you have to jump through some hoops to get intellisense working for you.
That's not a good way to introduce yourself to a technology, in my opinion.
Here where I think Silverlight is actually a good technology to use:
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Streaming video.
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This is one of the main commercial uses of this technology at the moment, and it sure beats the pants of other streaming formats.
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It would greatly benefit by better tools for encoding, but Expression 2.0 looks pretty decent so far (in beta).
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Displaying vector graphics with small amounts of interactivity
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Lets face it, you can code any amount of logic yourself into a Canvas framework, but the power of Silverlight is in its ability to reproduce WPF, which in turn is really only useful with its vector graphics capabilities, combined with the layour frameworks.
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Until we get more of WPF to work with, getting more experience with XAML's in terms of more static vector objects is a good idea.
I can't wait for Silverlight 2.0, and I can't wait until we can all save each other oodles of time be coding Asp.Net controls that aggregate a whole wack of functionality into a simple tag that we drop into our sites and customize to our hearts content.
Stay tuned...