Back in February I posted about when the right time for a new technology is.  As some likely guessed after seeing my review of Everyday Scripting with Ruby and the list of books that were on my next up list I decided to go with Rails as my new technology for one of the projects.  In a future post I'll detail how I've found the experience, and how it compares to .NET land but that's for another day.  Today, I'd like to point out the fact that nobody writes anything cool in .NET.  At least nobody writes any of the cool stuff that I need in .NET.  Ok, perhaps I'm exagerating a bit....in actuality the fact is that nobody writes social network visualization libraries in .NET. :)  The project that I'm working on that's using Rails involves social networks.  One of the things that I'll be getting to shortly is the actual visualization part of the project.  What I'd really love is if someone would write something as cool as this, in Silverlight.   That way I could have my Rails application call .NET code.  What could be better to piss off the Rails purists?  Afterall, I'm supposed to have given up all things .NET by now and truelly converted to Rails, right?  Ok, moving on....who wants to write prefuse in Silverlight?  It'd be a killer demo application to show off the capabilities of Silverlight and would undoubtedly make it so the only RIA platform anyone chooses is Silverlight.  Flash who?  Java FX what?  Flex...I think not.  With prefuse.NET, Silverlight is guaranteed instant mass approval.  Or maybe it'll just make me happy that I get to write .NET code that will access a RESTful Rails service for data that lives inside a rhtml page.  Either way you win, right?

In all seriousness I think Silverlight would be a great technology for building web based network visualization software.  While there's no way I'll have time to write something as fully functional as I'll need, I think I'll apply the learn a new technology even if it will take longer rule and give getting a basic network visualization demo in Silverlight working.  Luckily, I think some of the Silverlight samples (such as this one) might get me moving in the right direction.  If anyone cares to lend a hand, give me a shout!  Instance fame and fortune is within your grasp!