I was curious about Silverlight's ability to create casual games with decent (circa 1985) graphics, frame rate, input and sound so I started on an Asteroids type proof of concept (gee, how many of those do you think are gonna surface!)

SEE MY WORK-IN-PROGRESS (you'll need Silverlight Alpha, link on page)

The game is not complete yet, but I think its safe to say Silverlight will support some fairly adequate games in the "casual" category. I'm seeing about 60 fps on the asteroids clone.

I have to go on the road for the next few days so I won't be able to finish this thing off right away but I'll be getting some code and tips up eventually. Here are a couple of things I ran into with the Alpha:

• I needed to implement my own (crappy) collision detection. I really expected with all of the vector capabilities that HitTest functionality would be in Silverlight but it isn't (yet anyway).
  
• There isn't a "real timer" class in Silverlight yet, so you need to use an Animation Timer as a workaround (see prior blog post)
  
• They KeyDown event doesn't appear to support arrow keys. Hopefully this will be fixed before release.
  
• I'm not sure if this is something I'm doing but my MediaElement only plays once (yeah I need to add in more sfx too anyway)