Silverlight Goes 1.0 With Linux Support on the Horizon

Posted by Scott Delap on Sep 05, 2007

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Rich Internet Apps

Microsoft officially launched Silverlight 1.0 today with support for OS X and Windows. Additionally they will be working with Novell to extend support to Linux. Linux support will be based on Mono. Microsoft's Scott Guthrie provides a detailed overview of the release and its new features:

• Built-in codec support for playing VC-1 and WMV video, and MP3 and WMA audio within a browser... It is a standards-based media format that is implemented in all HD-DVD and Blueray DVD players, and is supported by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, XBOX 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Windows Media Centers (enabling you to encode content once and run it on all of these devices + Silverlight unmodified)...
• Silverlight supports the ability to progressively download and play media content from any web-server ... No special server software is required, and Silverlight can work with any web-server (including Apache on Linux). We'll also be releasing an IIS 7.0 media pack that enables rich bandwidth throttling features that you can enable on your web-server for free.
• Silverlight also optionally supports built-in media streaming. This enables you to use a streaming server like Windows Media Server on the backend to efficiently stream video/audio (note: Windows Media Server is a free product that runs on Windows Server)...
• Silverlight enables you to create rich UI and animations, and blend vector graphics with HTML to create compelling content experiences. It supports a Javascript programming model to develop these...

Guthrie goes on to say that the Sliverlight Linux project (codenamed Moonlight) will run on all Linux distributions and support FireFox, Konqueror, and Opera. It will support both the JavaScript programming model as well as the full .NET programming model of Silverlight 1.1. Silverlight 1.1 will support a WPF programming model and features such as layout management, data-binding, and control skinning. It will also including support for collections, generics, IO, threading, globalization, networking (including sockets, web-services and REST support), HTML DOM, XML, local storage, and LINQ.

Adobe's Ted Patrick looks at the release from the perspective of Flash and Flex:

...SilverLight forced Adobe to speed up existing plans and focus on broad adoption while adding great developer features in the runtime. Internally the gloves are off and teams are full speed ahead creating the next generation of RIA tools and runtimes. SilverLight was a driving factor in creating "MovieStar" and pushing our H.264 adoption plans forward with full 720/1080p hardware scaling support. When "MovieStar" ships in the next few months, yes in 2007, it will support millions of existing H.264 video content by default without special streaming solutions or proprietary video codecs like Microsoft's VC1....

Patrick goes on to mentioned that Adobe will be showing off the next full Flash Player release code named "Astro" at the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago later this month.

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