14 DAY TRIAL // In the first half of July, Microsoft was wrapping up the first release candidate for its Adobe Flash killer, and promising a release by the end of the month. Well, the Redmond company managed to get through the stabilization stage, and Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. With this new milestone of Silverlight, Microsoft is closing in on the launch of the product's final version. Silverlight 1.0 Beta was introduced at MIX07 in Las Vegas earlier this year. Tim Sneath, Microsoft Client Platform Technical Evangelist, revealed that between the May availability of Silverlight 1.0 and RC1, the company dealt with approximately 2,000 bugs.
"This version of the runtime is vastly more stable than the beta release: our stress test runs show improvements of two or three orders of magnitude in many cases, and the product demonstrates the polish one might expect from a near-final release. Along with the 1.0 RC1 release, we've also refreshed the 1.1 bits. We've not exposed any significant changes in the .NET extensions, but the 1.1 "alpha refresh" includes the same core runtime as 1.0 RC1. A note on installation: if you have the beta release on your machine, there's no need to uninstall - simply run the RC1 installer and it will overwrite the existing binaries on your machine," Sneath explained.
It is important to note that, at this point in time, Microsoft considers Silverlight feature complete, and even the JavaScript-based API has reached its final form. With Silverlight, the Redmond company is offering an alternative to Adobe's Flash. Microsoft's cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in is essentially designed to deliver the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications to web development. Dislodging Flash from its dominative position is also in Microsoft's plans, but such a scenario will not happen over night.
"Inevitably (given that this release isn't 100% compatible with the previous one, particularly as regards the object activation model), a lot of the samples out there today are broken. We've worked with a few folk that we know to help them prepare for this release, but if you have a Silverlight sample or site out there today based on the existing beta release, you'll want to pick up the new silverlight.js and work through the breaking changes to move your site up to the new release. We won't break you again, we promise," Sneath added.