Onward to Silverlight 2.0, Microsoft's Flash Killer Grows Up

Microsoft is making headway toward the delivery of Silverlight 2.0. Silverlight is of course the Redmond company's cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in (although Linux support is still in development via the Moonlight project, Novell's Linux compatible Silverlight runtime implementation). Because Silverlight is designed to support rich Internet applications and interactive web-based user experiences, the plug-in is an obvious alternative to Adobe's Flash. Well, Silverlight 1.0 is growing up little by little on its way to Silverlight 2.0.

"We released a very minor update to the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in this week. There's no changes to the core itself, apart from a fix to improve logging of Windows Media audio-only streams; as a result, machines won't auto-update unless the site they visit explicitly requests the new version. (The new version is build 1.0.30109.0, incidentally)," revealed Tim Sneath, Microsoft group manager for client platforms.

The update was announced last week and it concerned customers that have implemented Windows Server Update Services. Silverlight is pushed as an optional update via WSUS to Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003. But at the same time, Silverlight build 1.0.30109.0 is also available through Microsoft Update, the update source for WSUS. At this point in time, Microsoft revealed no plans to serve Silverlight through Windows Update or Automatic Updates.

Silverlight build 1.0.30109.0 features modifications to the installation process in order to facilitate and streamline enterprise-wide deployments of the plug-in. With this Silverlight update, Microsoft has tweaked the plug-in, so it will no longer require administrative privileges for installation. The Redmond company plans to drop the first public beta version of Silverlight 2.0 this March at MIX 08.

"Many customers have requested help with deploying Silverlight internally, and this change will hopefully be welcomed by enterprises who want to distribute Silverlight within their organizations using their established management tools. By adding it as an optional update, enterprises can control the roll-out of Silverlight within their organizations and schedule its installation as a background task so that the perceptible impact is minimal, and ensure that end-users can view Silverlight content without requiring administrative rights to install the plug-in," Sneath added.