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Microsoft releases Silverlight 2

More open source development support and collaboration improvements top the list of new features in Microsoft’s rival to Adobe’s Flash and AIR.

By Chris Green, 14 Oct 2008 at 10:59

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Microsoft late last night announced a new version of its Silverlight technology.

The new version of Silverlight, which is available for download from today, is seen as a rival to Adobe’s Flash technology and AIR platform, which allow developers to add media and graphically rich interfaces and delivery mechanisms to web sites.

New features include deep zooming capabilities for high-resolution images, improved digital rights management (DRM) controls, better user interface customisation options and expanded .NET Framework language support.

“We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET developer division at Microsoft.

Microsoft has also announced further support for open source integration with Silverlight. It intends to providing funding to Soyatec, a France-based IT solutions provider and Eclipse Foundation member, to lead a project to integrate advanced Silverlight development capabilities into the Eclipse open source Java-based developer environment.

Earlier this year, web services vendor Tibco announced plans to create development interfaces using Silverlight.

Since it launched in September last year, Silverlight has been growing in popularity despite concerns about proprietary formats, particularly among media companies and broadcasters looking to stream content on the web.

US broadcaster NBC used Silverlight to deliver multiple video streams of Olympics coverage online during the summer, while the DRM features ensured that only US viewers could access the service, in order to comply with broadcasting rights restrictions.

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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 p*rn on it! Free p*rn!\" 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. (My blog rant: <a href=\"http://tinyurl.com/6rxgnd\">http://tinyurl.com/6rxgnd</a> )

By dgerard on Sunday Oct 19