14 DAY TRIAL // In Microsoft's perspective, Silverlight is a cross-browser and cross-platform plug-in designed to "light up the web" with interactive media experiences and applications. In translation, Silverlight is nothing more than an alternative to Adobe Flash, not yet a Flash killer, although the potential is there. Silverlight enables developers to build .NET-based content for the web, offering a programming model with support for AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby. At this point in time, Silverlight is compatible with the Windows and Mac OS X platforms, with Linux support in the work. Among the resources offered under the Silverlight umbrella, there are the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in and the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh. The latter is intended as a developer-exclusive release, and Microsoft warned that v1.0 content is not always compatible with v1.1. Alpha.
"Silverlight 1.1 (now known as 2.0) is not ready for "Go Live" usage at this stage, and the EULA explicitly prohibits deployment in production sites", explained Tim Sneath, Microsoft Group Manager for client platforms. "Why is this? Primarily it's because the currently-available 1.1 bits were produced very early in the development milestone, and they are not being actively serviced. If you have Silverlight 1.1 on your machine, the latest version you are likely to have is 1.1.20926.0 (where the last four digits of the build number indicate that this build was compiled on 09/26, i.e. September 26th). We actually shipped a maintenance release a couple of weeks ago for 1.0 (build 1.0.21115.0), but we're not attempting to keep the 1.1 alpha build in sync with this. (Hey, it's a developer preview build!)"
Sneath made it very clear that in specific situations 1.1 alpha will not be able to manage accordingly 1.0 sites. This will lead to errors in loading 1.0 content - such a scenario is generally connected with the minimum build number of the Silverlight release, requested in the manifest of the websites. "And that's why we're not clearing 1.1 for "Go Live" / production usage at this stage - we don't want it to be broadly deployed. It's not fair for us or anyone else to inflict alpha-quality software on their customer base to view a website! We'll have a solution here by MIX (MIX08), but I hope this explains the intent behind the current licensing", Sneath added.