Silverlight 2.0 brought the ease of .NET programming to web browser based applications.  No more do you need to fidget with javascript.  Instead, you’re able to develop your application using C#.  I loved this when it was released.  Most of the demos for Silverlight 2 that were created were very graphical and multimedia based.  It seemed that Microsoft wanted to really showcase how slick you can make your Silverlight applications.  That’s great for marketing and gimmicky types of applications, what what about business application developers?  What they really need is enhanced tools and frameworks for their “n-tier” systems.  How can we work with data easily?  How can we make network communication more efficient?

Silverlight 3.0 is going to help with this. 

In this video, Brad Abrams demonstrates some of the new features in Silverlight 3.0 that will help the business application developers get more out of their applications.  It’s a good watch.

Similarly, the very next day, IdeaBlade's Ward Bell demonstrates their own toolkit for helping business application developers create great and efficient Silverlight applications.

I think Silverlight is getting alot more interesting for business developers.