Silverlight 1.0 Launched, With Linux Support
Microsoft today released Silverlight 1.0, its cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering interactive apps on the Web. It's often compared to Adobe's Flash plug-in and is certainly a direct competitor of Flash.
Also today Microsoft announced they'll work with Novell to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, in a project called Moonlight - based on the open source Mono project of the same name. As CNET reported in June, work on the Moonlight plug-in was started in May, after Microsoft's Mix conference - where Silverlight was first announced.
As is usual whenever Microsoft launches a new technology, it comes with high profile content provider support. They announced today some new Silverlight apps on US broadcasters Entertainment Tonight, HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment. Microsoft also launched the Silverlight Partner Initiative, to enable third party vendors to collaborate.
In the announcement, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie emphasized the cross-platform nature of Silverlight, noting that "Silverlight will further accelerate the growth in rich interactive applications by giving developers and designers new options for delivering great experiences that span the Web, PC, phone and other devices."
Example Silverlight app
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As I said back when this was announced, I think Silverlight is going to be huge. It's going to change the web -- it enables the move past web2.0 limited by the abilities of JavaScript and HTML. It's no glorified Microsoft-branded Flash plugin; the ability to write managed .NET code that runs right in the browser brings the full power of desktop development, and the full .NET professional development community, to the web landscape for the first time. Browser applications, powered by a plugin even dialup users can handle at a few megabytes in size, can be as rich and performant as their desktop counterparts while maintaining all the benefits of hosted "software as a service". Even our less advanced AJAX apps can be improved as Silverlight penetration increases over time -- JavaScript run through Silverlight (which has full access to the DOM just like it does natively) runs many times faster than any major browser's JavaScript parser.
I know I'm just rehashing the benefits we talked about back at MIX07, but I think this is something to watch. It'll take a while to pick up, like any new technology, but I think the web will be very different in 3 years and Silverlight will drive a lot of the innovation.
Yes I love Silverlight! If used correctly, this can improve the web.. but it won't. Silverlight provides developers too much freedom, and that means important things like font-size, navigation etc. will be to innovative and we will end up inaccessible sites.
If there are too much freedom as emba said, that means we need some best practice and so on to guide the team development.At the same time, it's challenging for development organizer to keep everything in control on performance and quality.
We have to agree that Microsoft relies on that platform...
hope to see that Silverlight soon integrated into Visual Studio IDE!
The audio and video is out of sync in every video I have watched so far. I will admit that HSN's live feed is pretty cool though. Any one looked at the WinForms stuff yet?
Just a quick caveat - it does not have Linux support today. It will, "in the coming months" - but it isn't there alongside the launch of 1.0 for other platforms.
May not seem like much of a difference unless you're trying to view a silverlight app on Linux, where it makes a huge difference. ;)
A silverlight google coop search engine
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006422944775554126616%3Apiljwfxcemo
Some real competition in this area is long overdue - I'll definitely be watching this.
How Microsoft will address Silverlight and mobile is going to be an interesting question. Mobile is partially Adobe's sore point, but at the same time Microsoft would be giving the technology to direct competition such as Symbian/s60.
The approach they are taking to Linux is however a good start.
Why would I use this over Actionscript 3.0?
Oh dear, I'm shocked at the number of people who think this will be the web's savior. Well how will it handle people with impaired vision or hearing? What are it's accessibility features? How can it gracefully degrade for those who don't have the required plugin? From what I've seen so far, it doesn't degrade gracefully or otherwise. What about people using text-based browsers such as lynx? I have frequent occasions that allow me only this luxury and flash, silverlight, moonlight, are entirely graphics based, how can they exist when a browser either isn't graphical, or has graphics disabled for bandwidth, or security, or ACL reasons?
I'm not the only one who can see past the immediate benefits it will bring now, ie the instant gratification, and look to the future it will create, it's not a pretty one. I want no part of it, and can easily predict it's demise, like most of Microsoft, it will be slow and cumbersome, will inconvenience a lot of people, customers and otherwise.
In my vision, there are two major components which will make this technology a success. One, Microsoft needs to spread the adoption of this technology through large partnerships and great support. Two, the open source implementation with Moonlight needs to work well and become popular. Both of these factors are very (maybe even equally) important, and if done right, it could catch like wildfire.
I have to applaud MS on their vision here. It certainly departs from their previous patterns, and has an element of acknowledgment that the future of computing and the internet is through real cross-platform adoption, and furthermore open source collaboration. The platforms for software need to be open and compatible, and then companies like MS can release excellent software on top of it.
If the Moonlight project succeeds, and the whole technology is stable and usable, then there will likely be some serious contributions from the community. This could make it much more stable and standards-friendly, and open up support for accessibility... the sort of things the open source community excels at. If you've done some serious work with Flash, you know the nightmares that await with proprietary code. Then you've got the possibilities for feature extension by the community... who knows what someone might add, creating a whole new value-add area that MS didn't identify in the beginning.
Go MS. Go OS. Yeehaw :-D
What? Hello? I can't hear you over the iPod clatter. What a bad day to announce anything. Finally Microsoft will learn the hard lesson of going up against a strong competitor with a completely dominant market position. The end user in me feels no reason to run out and install another plugin. They're going to need a killer app. I'll believe it when I see it.
Can I use this with Java? I don't plan on buying visual studio .net or whatever it is called now just so I can develop against this. If it's not open source all the way, why bother, just use flash. I haven't seen anything that indicates this is better/different than flash. Has anyone else?
The biggest strength of Silverlight is that it brings all the .NET guys and their skills into the Web. The HD video samples (VC-1 codec) are impressive, although Flash just released the very same thing with the competing codec that Apple also uses (h.264).
As a Flash developer, I'm very happy that there's some competition in the space and I'd switch to Silverlight in a minute if that's what the project required. The biggest disadvantage for me are the tools. "Expression Blend"? Gimme a break. Why would I learn MS suite of tools (yes I've tried them) when Adobe's is so deep already?
microsoft is making a cross browser, cross platform app? that's like the oil industry making alternative energy initiatives. for now i'm hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. i'll believe it when i see it (on my ubuntu pc).
From what I've seen the only one trilled about Silverlight technology are the existing .NET developers, thats like thinking that the ASP will win over PHP, only now its now competing with the open-source community but against the market leaders. Plus the Silverlight has nothing more that Flash already has to offer, so common this is not serious, this is polishing the silver plaits on Titanic.
I don't see anything that spectacular... why did they waste time developing this when everything it does can already be done?
hmm. anytime microsoft tries to copy something like Flash, I would assume it sucks. With the existence of WMV and IE (which are both horrid), I doubt this will be totally great
Microsoft has been trying to get into this market for ages. The chances are probably pretty slim that they'll be able to put a dent in Adobe's market share this time.
"Plus the Silverlight has nothing more that Flash already has to offer"
Uh... Flash lets you create movies. With ActionScript. Yay.
Silverlight lets you build entire applications. In almost a dozen languages. With the full .NET framework desktop applications for Windows are already built with. And the full modern presentation layer (Silverlight is essentially WPF - Windows Presentation Foundation - wrapped up into a browser plugin).
The same WPF code you write with .NET for a desktop app can run on Xbox or a mobile phone or a browser through Silverlight. It's *a lot* more than Flash does.
Interesting? Why can't you download the source code? I tried. the tar.gz files are empty. lol.