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14 Oct 2008
Microsoft has released the latest version of its Silverlight web application tool, promising a "radical improvement" in the way developers and designers build applications on the web.
Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .Net developer division, said in the announcement on Monday: "This release will further accelerate our efforts to make Silverlight, Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Studio the preeminent solutions for the creation and delivery of media and rich internet application experiences."
Silverlight 2.0 is the first version of the platform to fully support Microsoft's .Net developer framework, allowing developers to write code in several different programming languages.
The new version will also include new features for Silverlight applications, such as a calendar function and the ability to zoom on images.
The Silverlight software will be supported on the latest versions of the Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer browsers for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Microsoft hopes that the updated version of Silverlight will increase the platform's reach within the consumer market.
The company estimates that Silverlight has reached up to 25 per cent of the consumer market in just over a year, but it still lags far behind competing technologies such as Flash and Java, which are already installed on virtually every browser-enabled computer.
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Microsoft releases Silverlight 2.0, nobody cares
Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found. "We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My resumé's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man, the walking dead!" Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures. "But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We'll put porn on it! Free porn!" Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read. In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.
Posted by: David Gerard 19 Oct 2008