At its web-centric conference in Las Vegas - MIX08, Microsoft unveiled Silverlight 2 Beta 1. Along with the company's chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer team, at this year's MIX, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division, took the stage and he unveiled Silverlight 2 Beta 1. The first beta for Silverlight 2 is now available for download. According to Tim Sneath, Microsoft group manager for client platforms, Silverlight's adoption rate is quite consistent, and the company expects it only to accelerate.

"Right now, we're seeing over 1.5 million installations of Silverlight per day; we're seeing the number increase every week and expect to see it increase still further as we launch Silverlight 2," Sneath said. "The media has been a big focus for us with Silverlight 1.0, and we're extending that with Silverlight 2. We're announcing support for adaptive streaming, which assesses bandwidth and CPU dynamically you are playing a video and reduces or increases the bit-rate of the streamed media based on the available resources. You don't have to write any additional code to support this. We're also announcing a strategic relationship with Move Networks this morning - the company that powers many broadcasters' on-demand sites today."

But Silverlight 2 Beta 1, the plug-in designed as an Adobe Flash killer, is not just about the cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in, but also about the software development kit. Concomitantly with the new version of the plug-in, developers can now access the Silverlight 2 Software Development Kit Beta 1, as well as the Source Code and Unit Tests for Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Controls and the documentation associated with the SDK. In his presentation, Guthrie highlighted features such as Deep Zoom, and well over 40 new controls on top of a rich .NET base class library of functionality.