Microsoft's Flash killer is all grown up now, and as such the company introduced Silverlight 2.0, the successor of Silverlight 1.1. Well, the fact of the matter is that Silverlight 2.0 is nothing more than a rebranding. Tim Sneath, Microsoft resident group manager for client platforms, revealed that, in an effort to deliver a tad of transparency into the company's plans for the next release of Silverlight, the rebranding of Silverlight into version 2.0 is a phase of the introduction of support for C# and Visual Basic development on top of the .NET Framework. But as of now, Microsoft is offering a taste of Silverlight 2.0 and nothing more, and so users will still have to rely on the current alpha developer preview available.

"Firstly, we're announcing today that we're renaming Silverlight 1.1 to Silverlight 2.0. As we've been building out the feature set for Silverlight v.Next, it's been becoming increasingly clear that this is a big release. Adding together the Common Language Runtime, Base Class Libraries, Dynamic Language Runtime, the UI Frameworks, DRM, and a bunch of other features I'm not going into at this stage, it's apparent that if this doesn't count as a major version release, the bar will be set so impossibly high that we'll never be able to name a Silverlight release as anything other than version 1.x! At the end of the day, this is just branding," Sneath explained.

Developers will not be able to get their hands on the next release of Silverlight just yet. Nor for quite some time in fact. Sneath promised that the first public release of Silverlight 2.0 will be delivered at MIX08. I don't know if you remember, but Silverlight was the indisputable star at MIX07. It seems that next year, between the 5th and 7th of March, 2008, at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, Silverlight 2.0 will become available, as Microsoft is wrapping up with the third internal development milestone and has one more stage to go before March, next year.

"So what's coming in Silverlight 2.0? I think the thing that excites me the most about this release is the scale and breadth of UI innovation going into Silverlight. In WPF, we have a really powerful platform for building Windows desktop applications, and it will remain the "Ferrari" that contains the highest level of graphical functionality. Silverlight takes that same UI framework and transports it to the web, enabling RIA developers to create web-based applications using all the same skills as they need to build sophisticated Windows client applications," Sneath added.