Silverlight Boosts the Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 Experience

The latest iteration of Microsoft’s email client sports a range of enhancements, from new features to performance improvements and to integration with major social networks worldwide. But elements of the evolution of Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 are also connected to Microsoft Silverlight, a technology the Redmond company used to enhance additional Cloud offerings such as the latest major release of Bing Maps, for example. Silverlight is powering a few aspects of the Windows Live Wave 4 experience related to Hotmail, but also to additional services, boosting the way in which documents and images can be shared.

“Silverlight allows for an efficient upload of multiple attachments, by giving users the option to send them as links to online files. The files are then uploaded to Windows Live SkyDrive, where users get 25GB of free online storage space. Furthermore, having Silverlight installed provides the best experience with viewing attachments: The new ‘Hotmail Active View’ uses Silverlight to allow attached photos to display in a slideshow,” a member of the Silverlight team stated.

Microsoft started rolling out Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 worldwide on June 15th, 2010. The service continues to be in Beta development stage at this point in time, and will be offered to all 360 million active users within the next weeks. Earlier this year, Microsoft released the latest iteration of its alternative to Adobe Flash, namely Silverlight 4, which is currently available for download.

“Also, Office documents, such as PowerPoint presentations, that are sent to Hotmail can be opened via Microsoft's new browser-based Office Web Apps that use Silverlight to optimize the viewing experience. With Silverlight, Hotmail users will therefore be able to view and edit an Office document in their browser, even if they don’t have Microsoft Office installed on their PC,” the Silverlight team representative added.

Silverlight 4 Build 4.0.50524.0 RTW is available for download here.