14 DAY TRIAL // If Facebook embraced Adobe's ActionScript, MySpace managed to adopt its direct rival, Microsoft's Silverlight. And while Adobe launched the ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform API, officially supported by Facebook along with PHP and JavaScript, MySpace announced that the MySpace Open Platform would play nice with Silverlight. With this move, developers will now be able to build Silverlight applications tailored specifically for the MySpace Developer Platform.
“Microsoft is pleased to work with MySpace to enable developers to create compelling and custom OpenSocial applications using Silverlight,” revealed Brian Goldfarb, director of the developer platform group at Microsoft. “By utilizing the Open Source kit released by Microsoft and MySpace, developers can now harness the power of the rich media features in Silverlight to take the user experience to a new level for the MySpace community.”
But MySpace did not stop at introducing support for Silverlight in the MySpace Developer Platform. The social networking hotspot also made available the Open Source kit, set to up streamline the development and integration of rich media features into OpenSocial applications. At the same time, the two companies are cooking yet another aspect of their collaboration, according to Michael S. Scherotter, developer evangelist, Communications Sector of North America Microsoft.
“On Thursday, April 2, MySpace and Microsoft will jointly release a kit on the CodePlex Open Source site (with the MS-PL License) that will make it easy for developers using Visual Studio and designers using Expression Blend to create Silverlight applications on MySpace’s OpenSocial-based developer platform,” Scherotter explained.
Microsoft said that the collaboration with MySpace would keep Silverlight in tune with the evolution of the MySpace Developer Platform, enabling new resources for developers to build interactive applications for the social network. “Working with developers at MySpace we’ve created a kit that would let designers with Expression Blend use data binding in Silverlight to connect to the data provided by the MySpace Developer Platform. We’ve even added design-time and offline sample data to the kit to aid in development,” Scherotter added.