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Mono Moonlight goes gold


By David Worthington
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February 11, 2009 —  Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight runtime for Linux, reached its first milestone today.

The Mono team has made Moonlight 1.0 generally available for Linux distributions, including Fedora, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu. Moonlight 1.0 is licensed under the GNU Library General Public License.

Moonlight's source code was published in May while it was still in beta.

Its final release was originally slated for August to coincide with the release of Silverlight 2.0. A preview version was released earlier this month for streaming the U.S. Presidential inauguration.

When asked why its release was delayed, Miguel de Icaza, vice president of developer platforms for Novell and leader of the Mono project, said that the delay was caused by "logistics on getting the media codecs ported, signed and distributed."

Microsoft does not directly support Moonlight, but it has nurtured its development by contributing its technical guidance to the project, as first reported by SD Times. Novell will handle all Moonlight support requests.

Microsoft has supplied Novell with test suites for the Common Language Runtime, Microsoft’s implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure standard, to create Moonlight. Microsoft has also open-sourced high-level pieces of Silverlight 2 under the Microsoft Public License.

"Without those controls, it would have taken years for us to catch up with Microsoft," de Icaza noted in his blog.

In addition, Microsoft has also granted the Mono team access to the Microsoft Media Pack, a set of licensed media codecs for video and audio. The codecs support decoding for Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio and MP3 files.

As an alternative, Developers may compile FFmpeg codecs themselves. FFmpeg is an open-source tool for audio and video conversion.

“We have worked with the Moonlight team and Novell to enable interoperability between Windows and Linux platforms, and [to] extend the high-quality interactive Web and video experience for the benefit of the Linux community,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft.

Now that it has reached parity with Silverlight 1.0, the Mono team is focused on delivering Moonlight 2, which is based on Silverlight 2.0. The source code for an early build is available on the project's website. Microsoft is continuing to help the project along, wrote de Icaza in his blog.

De Icaza indicated that Moonlight development would continue through Silverlight 3.0, which Microsoft is expected to announce at its MIX conference in Las Vegas in March. Silverlight 3.0 will include additional controls, an editable and interactive designer for Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express, and richer data-binding support, according to Microsoft.




Related Search Term(s): Linux, Mono Moonlight


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