Novell continues to trail Microsoft with its own implementation of Silverlight for the Linux open-source operating system. While the Redmond company has released Silverlight 2 RTW in 2008, and since then moved onward to the first Beta of Silverlight 3 in March 2009, Novell is just now starting to offer a preview of Moonlight 2.0. But in order to close in the gap that separates the Linux and Windows implementations of Microsoft's alternative to Adobe Flash, Moonlight 2.0 will bring to the table some of the features that the Redmond company has introduced in Silverlight 3.

“As we were implementing the 2.0 APIs a handful of features from 3.0 fit naturally into our design. So instead of going the extra mile to limit things in 2.0, we just expose the 3.0 APIs in a forward-compatible fashion. This Moonlight preview includes a few 3.0 features: out-of-browser support (although this is currently a manual process, not yet automated, and without a GUI); WritableBitmap class; 3.0 pluggable media pipeline and SaveDialog support,” revealed Novell Developer Platform Vice President Miguel de Icaza.

Of course that, being developed by Novell, Moonlight is an open-source project. In this context, while the actual binaries are up for grabs, the source code can also be downloaded and tweaked in accordance with the open-source model. The same is not valid for Silverlight. De Icaza underlined that the Preview label under which the first taste of Moonlight 2.0 was available to Linux users indicated that Novell had yet to deliver a fully featured solution, and that additional evolution should be expected.

“One of the reasons we delayed the first preview of Moonlight for public consumption was that we did not want to release Moonlight without the security sandbox,” de Icaza added. “Moonlight 2.0 ships with the new CoreCLR Sandbox that was introduced in Silverlight 2.0. This security system is very easy to understand, it is pretty straightforward and is a lot easier to secure and audit than something like CAS.”

Moonlight 2.0 Preview is available for download here.

Silverlight 3 Beta 3 is available for download here.