As most will know by now, Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web, an Adobe Flash competitor. Mary Jo Foley discovered a Microsoft blogger published the Silverlight 2.0 timetable. Microsoft blogger Ashish Thapliyal blogged on April 3 that Microsoft is targetting “late summer†for the final release of Silverlight 2.0. Here’s the rest of the “rough†timeline, according to Thapliyal: Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 (Q1CY08 with limited (non commercial) Go-Live) — this was released at Mix ‘08 in early March Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 (Q2CY08 with Go-Live) Silverlight 2.0 RTM (Summer 2008) – Exact timing TBD Silverlight v.next – We are working on a v.Next plan and have nothing to announce at this time Silverlight for mobile – No date available (Microsoft has said it will release Silverlight 1.0 on Windows Mobile 6.0 phones in the second quarter of this year, but hasn’t released any timing information on its Silverlight 2.0 for Mobile.....) (Thanks to Ars Technica for the pointer to Thapliyal’s blog post.) Some other interesting facts can be found in the Silverlight Roadmap question post. Currently Silverlight supports playing VC-1, WMV, MP3 and WMA content, there are no plans to expand that list, if you want to use another format you will have to convert that with Microsoft Expression Encoder. Websites designed with Silverlight 1.0 will be compatible when 2.0 comes out and there won't be drastic changes between Beta 2 and the final. I'm looking forward to seeing more Silverlight usage around the net, and not just sites like the new Microsoft Videos Beta and Tafiti Search Visualization, .
Well, Silverlight is great, and it's just at its beginning. It overcomes Flash, which hadn't HD support until now. I think Silverlight will advance with high speed, because if you look at the features from 1.1 (2.0) compared to 1.0... are double! So we expect a hudle list of new features that are very easy to code, in the next releases. It's great to have such a small subset of .NET Framework on the web. I wonder how they did it
um.. could you please tell me what is this silver light?? I have heard about it at many places.. but I have no idea what it is. so.. can you please tell me more about it ?
I'm planning to go 100% into Silverlight. And since its a new technology I should have little competitioin for NOW lol.
True. I was surprised to see what it could do. Allows you to even interact with playing videos and see things advertised in it.
The beauty of it is not just the fact that is yet-another-competitor to Flash. The beauty is that you can leverage on your knowlegde of .NET languages. You don't need to learn another language (like Actionscript) in order to do some Silverlight apps. And it's also very easy, compared to Flash.