Microsoft used its Professional Developers Conference this week to show off the new Silverlight 4 beta.

The company claimed that applications will run 200 per cent faster on the new platform, and has been showing off its capabilities in the business applications sphere, using webcams and microphones as well as multi-user collaboration tools and rich animation.

The new software will have full connectivity with Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Office, and Internet Information Services, and will link up with Google's Chrome browser.

Developers will be able to run .NET Common Runtime software without recompiling on the platform, and editors for XAML, C# and VB languages are built in.

The announcements put Microsoft up against Adobe's Flash, as well as online collaboration software from Cisco and Polycom.

The company plans to release the final version of Silverlight in the first half of 2010, and explained that the beta is only in its first stages.

"This release of Silverlight 4 Beta is a developer release. What this means is that there is no 'go-live' licensing available, and the end-user runtime of Silverlight 4 is not available. The tools below are intended for software developers only," the company said.