Microsoft Launches Silverlight 2

• By theWHIR.com , October 14, 2008

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By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com

October 14, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Software giant Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) announced on Tuesday it has released Silverlight 2 (http://silverlight.net/), the latest version of its cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering rich media experiences.

According to its press release, Silverlight 2 includes a "wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences."

Microsoft has also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundation's integrated development environment and by providing new controls to developers with the Silverlight Control Pack under the Microsoft Permissive License.

"We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed," says Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET developer division at Microsoft. "Silverlight represents a radical improvement in the way developers and designers build applications on the Web. 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."

On the Silverlight 2 site, Guthrie offers an eight-part blog post series about the product's fundamentals, helping users build a sample application in the process. Microsoft also offers a downloadable tutorial video here.

Silverlight 2 has already drawn some criticisms and concerns. In Tim Anderson's ITWriting blog, Anderson calls Microsoft out for describing in its press release that Silverlight 2 offers "cross-platform and cross-browser support" and more specifically, includes support for "... Linux in Firefox, Safari and Windows Internet Explorer."

Anderson says this mention of Linux support is "misleading, to be generous," considering the software's installation section on the Silverlight 2 website only offers installations for Windows and Mac.

However, as Anderson points out, a visit to Moonlight, (www.go-mono.com/moonlight/) an open source test installer for Microsoft Silverlight designed for Unix systems, offers Linux installation for the software.

Adobe recently announced it will be releasing Flash Media Encoding Server, this fall which is set to compete with Silverlight for delivering online content.

Silverlight adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace, with market share in some countries nearing 50 percent, while drawing the support of more than 150 partners and tens of thousands of applications.

Silverlight powered NBCOlympics.com during the recent 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, which attracted more than 50 million unique visitors, 1.3 billion page views, and 70 million video streams throughout the 17 days, says the company.

Microsoft says Silverlight helped increase the average time on the site from 3 minutes to 27 minutes, as well as increased Silverlight market penetration in the US by more than 30 percent.

Silverlight was also used by various broadcasters in France, the Netherlands, Russia and Italy to deliver Olympics coverage online. Other major companies such as CBS College Sports, Blockbuster, Hard Rock Cafe International, Yahoo! Japan, AOL, Toyota Motor, HSN and Tencent also use Silverlight.

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