I just had the privilege to get up to Fort Collins, Colorado and present to the User's Group at www.northcolorado.net on Silverlight. We had a great time there looking at the technology and getting in to some interesting discussions surrounding Silverlight. Some individuals had some concern over the completeness of the release of the 1.0 technology, and felt that Microsoft should have waited to release that version until there was a complete set of controls like textboxes, datagrids, buttons, and many of the other things they had grown to take for granted in ASP.NET development.

Many of us raised the point that it was the development community that started pushing for Microsoft to release technologies early with community technology previews (CTP's) and Alpha and Beta releases. The Silverlight 1.0 release is significant in its interaction with media, and several top sites like NetFlix and MLB are integrating this quickly into their corporate offerings. The 1.1 release is significant in being first to expose the CLR to rich media cross-platform web development.

I for one am glad that Microsoft does NOT wait until all the products are complete before releasing technology to the communities. It may be a little overwhelming at times to keep the fast pace of learning the new technologies coming out, but the alternative of becoming obsolete certainly isn't any better. And feedback from early released product helps shape the future direction of the project. For the agile communities, you could even say this is a highly transparent process that incorporates good feedback loops.