Silverlight for Linux Evolves, Moonlight 2 Available for Download

At approximately a month after Microsoft released the first testing preview of Silverlight 4, the second major release of Moonlight has been made available for download, by Novell. While trailing Silverlight, the open source implementation of Microsoft’s alternative to Adobe Flash designed for Unix systems, is roughly at the level of Silverlight 2, a milestone which the Redmond company unveiled in 2008. Since then, Microsoft has taken Silverlight to version 3 and to the first Beta Build of version 4 at the Professional Developers Conference 2009 in Los Angeles. Still, Moonlight remains the best way for users running the Linux open source operating system to access videos, applications and content created for Silverlight.

“Moonlight 2 is a superset of Silverlight 2. It contains everything that is part of Silverlight 2 but already ships with various features from Silverlight 3,” explained Mono Project founder Miguel de Icaza. What this means is that, although Moonlight 2 is over a year late compared to Silverlight 2, it actually brings to the table technologies introduced by Microsoft in Silverlight 3 earlier this year.

“Silverlight 3 Pluggable Pipeline, this allows developers to hook into the media decoding pipeline at various points: Data fetching (this is how adaptive streaming and smooth streaming are supported). Test it out at Experience Smooth Streaming; Demuxing (this is how the Moonlight Ogg container can be fed into Moonlight and Microsoft's Silverlight); Codecs (this is how our Vorbis and Dirac support work on both Moonlight and Microsoft Silverlight),” de Icaza noted, adding that Moonlight 2 also features “Easing animation functions. Partial out-of-browser support. Writable bitmaps. Some of the new databinding features of XAML in Silverlight 3.”

The Novell project behind the open source implementation of Silverlight is currently laboring to provide users with full Silverlight 3 support. In this regard, de Icaza noted that Microsoft was collaborating closely with the developers of Moonlight, sharing test suites and helping make sure that flagship Silverlight applications play nice with Moonlight.

“Moonlight development is quickly following the innovation in Silverlight with each release. A preview release of Moonlight 3 will be made available in the first quarter of 2010 with a final release scheduled for the third quarter of 2010. Moonlight 4 will follow shortly thereafter,” revealed a member of the Silverlight team.

Moonlight 2 is available for download here.

Silverlight 4 SDK Beta is available for download here.
Silverlight 4 Beta is available for download here.