14 DAY TRIAL // In October 2008, Microsoft shipped the gold version of Silverlight 2, and the company moved onward with the development of its Flash killer. With Adobe having announced earlier this month that it accounted for record installations of Flash 10, revealing that the latest release of the technology was already deployed on 55% of the world's computers, Microsoft's Silverlight still has a long way to go, but fact is that the Redmond company is committed to the long run. With Silverlight 2 delivered in 2008, the software giant will offer Silverlight 3 by the end of this year, with a consistent taste scheduled for March 2009, at MIX09.
“I’m looking forward to the sessions on Silverlight 3, and many more cool technologies,” revealed G. Andrew Duthie, Microsoft developer evangelist. “Silverlight 3 Sessions at MIX09 - Join us at MIX and be among the first to get a look at Silverlight 3 and learn about the new features and tool support in the latest release. What’s New in Silverlight 3 - Learn about the new experience-oriented Silverlight 3 features, and see how to build Silverlight 3 applications using Expression Blend and Visual Studio. What's New in Silverlight 3 Media - Learn about the latest media features available with Silverlight 3. Deep Dive into Silverlight Graphics - Hear about the Silverlight 3 rendering pipeline, and learn how to enhance your application experience with the latest additions to the Silverlight graphics APIs.”
Silverlight 3 represents the evolution of Microsoft’s cross-platform browser plugin designed to enable rich media experiences and .NET Rich Internet Applications in combination with browsers. In just the first four weeks since it was initially made available, Silverlight 2 was downloaded and installed on in excess of 200 million machines worldwide. 2009 will bring with it the next major release of the technology, namely Silverlight 3.
According to Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft, Silverlight 3 will take media support to the next level (even by playing nice with H.264 video), but it will also introduce support for graphic enhancements, from 3D to GPU hardware acceleration. However, Microsoft will only dig deep inside Silverlight 3, come MIX09, between March 18-20 in Las Vegas.
Silverlight 2 RTW (2.0.31005.0) is available for download here.
Flash 10 is available for download here.