I’ve posted my interview with Scott Guthrie, from the UK Mix07. It covers topics including LINQ, Silverlight, the work with Novell/Mono on Moonlight (Silverlight for Linux), ASP.NET futures including MVC, and offline web applications.

Guthrie is a General Manager at Microsoft, responsible for most of the development teams working on .NET. He did some excellent presentations at the UK Mix, intermingling live coding and demos with slides, talk, and dealing with ad-hoc questions – not an easy task.

There were several things I found interesting in his answers to my questions. On a technical level, the way Microsoft’s various implementations of the Common Language Runtime share code is intriguing. In particular, I was fascinated to learn that Silverlight and the desktop CLR are built from the same code tree. There is a second code tree for the CLR, but it is for the Compact Framework, not for Silverlight. The implication is that the performance of Silverlight and its compatibility with other .NET code should be pretty good.

How then is Silverlight much smaller than the desktop CLR? The reason is that most of the Framework library is missing. That’s the trade-off.

Another point of interest is the strength of Guthrie’s reaction when I asked about offline web applications, and Microsoft’s platform versus other approaches such as Google Gears and Adobe AIR. When a spokesperson takes the trouble to trash the competition, it is often a sign of concern.