14 DAY TRIAL // A new release of the open source implementation of Silverlight for Linux is now available for download, just one day after Mono Project founder Miguel de Icaza announced that Moonlight 3 had reached the Preview 6 development milestone. One of the major changes introduced with this release is support for Google’s open source operating system. However, there are additional changes designed to bring features from Silverlight 3 for Windows to Linux users via Moonlight.
“New in this release: Chrome support and chrome packages; many performance improvements; most Silverlight 3 features are in now, including taking apps out-of-browser; hundreds of bug fixes and improvements our Silverlight 3 compatibility story,” de Icaza explained.
Moonlight 2 was released in December 2009, roughly the equivalent of Silverlight 2, and de Icaza and Novell went on to work on its successor. Moonlight 3.0 Preview 1 was offered to early adopters in February 2010, and marked the beginning of the project. When it initially talked Moonlight 3, de Icaza mentioned that Novell was planning for a third quarter 2010 release. There have been no indications of the fact that this detail has changed in any way, and, in this regard, the RTM of Moonlight is now less than half a year away.
Moonlight 3 Preview 6 gives “me a 'past the halfway mark' feeling relative to the goals they originally announced for Moonlight 3. I’m not quite ready to put a guess in for when they’ll be done though,” Nicholas Allen, Microsoft program manager, said. “Some of the improvements from the last few months have been around text control styling, smooth streaming, socket support, compatibility with popular sites, and integration with Firefox and Chrome. Moonlight 3 Preview 6 is largely on the way to compatibility with the feature set of Silverlight 3.”
Last week, Microsoft released Silverlight 4 to web, having RTM’d Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 just days earlier.
Moonlight 3.0 Preview 6 is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Express is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.
Silverlight 4 Build 4.0.50401.0 RTW is available for download here.