Richard Collette

@LexLavnikov - What's the performance on Mac Chrome?   Silverlight is(was) great for intranet development where you have control over the browser platform.  Not so much for the general internet.   Instead of having to constantly update Silverlight for N browsers, they can focus on a standards based development platform and do it one time.   Perhaps my feelings that Silverlight development is quicker will start to diminish when using TS.   UI behaviors are still majorly kludgy and incohesive compared to Silverlight.   JS/TS seems light years ahead of HTML/DOM at this point.

TS is awesome and the best part is that I believe I can be really productive with it with no more than a few hours of working with it. I can't say exactly why but it just seems to make sense, which is rare when it comes to new web technologies these days.
Fantastic presentation on this as well. I can't remember the last time someone demo'd something like this and it did not feel rushed, choppy or incomplete.

Point/Counter Point

• Aims to sell MS tooling - Not really since it's command line open source. But their tooling does do it well.
• Aims to replace JS with a proprietary language that locks you into MS tooling - Not really, in fact it generates straight JS that, from this video, appears rather tight and "manually" maintainable.
• Creates a redundant language that competes with existing OO languages like C# - If you've used any other language to compile to JS, you know that there are all kinds of limitations on that language and the IDE doesn't warn you of those incompatibilities. TS avoids impedance mismatch. I would love to see C# in the browser. Heck, I know Silverlight/C# are far more productive than JS/HTML development. The reality is that the browser standards are only being solidified so hoping for a miracle doesn't help anyone.
• Creates a redundant language that competes with existing compiled script languages like CoffeeScript - As others have pointed out CoffeeScript doesn't have the notion of types and frankly I find the syntax cryptic (could be just me). TypeScript is closer to the metal in my opinion. I don't see why we should be so dedicated to the first option on the block purely out of loyalty.  This isn't high school sports. Let's recognize an implemented innovation when we see it.
• Bloats an existing language that is already perfect and deserves no further improvement - You know, you have a point. Enjoy the refactoring support you already love and your co-workers will love you for the self documenting code that you have left behind for them. I am sure you're a winner.

I do recognize the effort that Dart has made and that is commendable but I have to say I did not "get it" the way I get TS simply by watching a 1 hour video. To me, this is super easy and at the same time resolves the issues causing .NET developers to loathe JS development. Together I can see this driving adoption in my company.

I didn't agree with the association someone was making between a strongly typed script languages and architectural complexity but I understood the underlying pain. It takes a ton of time to do:

UI=>JS=>Service=>BusinessObject=>DataAccessObject=>Stored Procedures

Note I have not even included all the redundancies like validation nor design time for UI/OO/Data Modeling. I think MS was starting down the path with LightSwitch but then changed gears completely by end of lifeing Silverlight (though I am no fan of Entity Framework).  Perhaps TS combined with LightSwitch will start to reduce the cycle time for applications over the long haul (If there is such a thing for MS).

@joeyw:First constructive post in a list of mostly uninformed whining.  The notion of async is interesting.    However, he did show the "meta" file you are seeking such as the ones for ECMAScript, jQuery, node.js, etc.  and also showed how the compiler can generate that for you as well.   Minification is a separate responsibility, but included in asp.net 4.5 as pluggable service.