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Microsoft focuses on wide Silverlight 2 implementation


By Jeff Feinman
October 13, 2008 — 
Microsoft is looking to increase the adoption rate and open-source capabilities of Silverlight, its media and rich Internet application platform. Version 2 was announced today.

Microsoft executives said that the company has focused on how to get Silverlight deployed on the most machines possible. The final release is a 4.5MB download that can install in under 10 seconds. All Silverlight 1 users will automatically be upgraded to version 2 in the coming weeks, and users don’t have to take an “explicit upgrade action.” As a result, Microsoft said it expects to see the software deployed on hundreds of millions of machines very quickly.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s developer division, said Microsoft hasn’t cut any features in the final release. He called Silverlight 1, which shipped a year ago, a basic media plug-in, but version 2 brings enhanced video and adaptive streaming for crisp video. Silverlight 2 has a cross-platform subset of the .NET framework, which is compatible with the full .NET version.

“This gives the ability to use any programming language you want, so you can use C#, JavaScript, Python or Ruby all within the browser to build applications,” Guthrie said. “This is pretty unique, no one else out there is doing anything like that.

“One of the things we’ve heard over the last year from .NET developers that they find exciting is the fact that they can now learn one language, one tool, and one common programming model, and be able to build rich UI applications inside the browser that look visually stunning. That application can run on the desktop using the full .NET framework. Having that continuum that spans the server side with ASP.NET, the browser side with AJAX and Silverlight, and the desktop with WPF provides this spectrum where developers are no longer limited by the types of projects they can work on.”

Code running inside the browser using the .NET framework and Silverlight can run more than 1,000 times faster than JavaScript running inside the browser, Microsoft executives claimed. Silverlight 2 can work with a rich UI programming model that provides calendars, sliders and other controls. Those controls can let developers program applications at a higher level rather than having to manipulate every UI element directly.

The new version of Silverlight allows control skinning and templating, so the developer can skin and customize a control without changing any code. There is also a rich networking stack, so users can call Web services and sockets on the Internet, which allows applications to span multiple sites.

“We think from a developer perspective it’s a really, really rich programming platform, and developers can partner with designers to build great experiences,” Guthrie said. “We’re looking forward to seeing what people build with it, and over the next year we’ll see a bunch of sites that will blow our minds in terms of capabilities.”

Guthrie called Silverlight 2 a unique release in terms of the unprecedented amount of deployments during its beta testing phase. For its Olympic broadcasts this past summer, NBC streamed more than 70 million videos in a two-week period with more than 600 million minutes of video, Guthrie said. Microsoft also streamed the U.S. Democratic National Convention using Silverlight.

Shining light on Eclipse
In addition to Silverlight 2, Microsoft is shipping Visual Studio Development Tools for Silverlight, which will work with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express, a free version of Visual Studio.

Microsoft is also funding a project to integrate Silverlight development capabilities into Eclipse on Sourceforge. That technology will be available tomorrow as a preview from its website. Brian Goldfarb, director of Microsoft’s development platform group, said that Eclipse interoperability will start with a Windows focus, but will eventually move onto Linux and Mac platforms.

Microsoft released the Silverlight XAML Vocabulary to provide specs and documentation to help Silverlight users read and write the XAML markup language. Goldfarb said Microsoft sees this as a commitment to enabling anyone to understand its XML-based XAML technology.

Microsoft also released the Silverlight Control Pack, an open-source project based on the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License. “Anyone can take that software, look at the source code and use it for their own education,” Goldfarb said. “It’s a great learning opportunity to see the best practices and decision making of Microsoft. You can derive from them and commercialize them, and the Microsoft Public License provides a great open source way to work with those controls in the Silverlight Control Pack.”

In order to increase Silverlight’s usage and put it on the forefront of mainstream developers’ minds, Microsoft said it is important to have both a compelling feature set and applications that people want to watch. Guthrie said Silverlight’s most potent capabilities are the ability to do multiple video streams at once and adaptive streaming. From an application standpoint, he said Microsoft hopes to have more events to stream with Silverlight, like the Olympics.


Related Search Term(s): .NET, open source, Silverlight, XML, Eclipse, Microsoft


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