Microsoft Launches Drag-And-Drop App Builder Popfly

Microsoft just demoed on stage at the Web 2.0 conference a slick Silverlight application development service called Popfly, which just opened up in beta. Popfly lets anyone, even non-coders, create web mashups without writing a single line of code. It’s all drag-and-drop in the browser (based on Silverlight, Microsoft’s answer to Flash/Flex and Ajax). The demo showed how to build a digital photo book of all your Facebook friends. It started with a box representing Facebook, and in a pane on the left were listed other data sets that can connect to Facebook, such as photos on another service or Technorati rankings. By simply dragging and dropping icons representing these sets of data and connecting them together with lines, a Silverlight application was built on the fly. Of course, like any demo, this one was a bit canned. But if Popfly turns out to be half as easy as Microsoft made it look on stage, it should have lots of takers.

Any TechCrunch readers who check it out, please report back your impressions in comments.