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Silverlight 2.0 Released
rfernand79 writes "Via Scott Guthrie's Blog for Microsoft, we find out that Silverlight 2.0 has been released. The blog post notes some interesting statistics, including the magnitude of video streamed during the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention (both using Silverlight). 'Hello Worlds' and educational links are included in the post."
As I still haven't installed Silverlight 1.0 or seen a site that requires it.
I was more excited to hear Garfield The Movie was getting a sequel.
Also no 2.0 for PowerPC Mac! I'm safe too!
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The value is on the developer side, not so much the user in this case. Silverlight allows one to use WPF and the .NET framework in a semi-crossplatform manner and in a browser. Saves time and money if you're a .NET shop. Not super useful for a web site thats going to be heavily public though, but nice for web -applications-, like internal apps or web apps that are heavily targeted (like say a CMS)
Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest.
"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. Google haven't called back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man, the walking dead!"
Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 98% of computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Close. Though version 2.0 isn't just "moderately better" than 1.0... its night and day, and shouldn't even have the same name. (Note: I'm not saying 2.0 is good or not... just that its a billion times better than 1.0...)
...call me again when Mono has an implementation.
I couldn't find your phone number, but here you go -- Mono project's Moonlight, the open source implementation of Silverlight.
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Full version up now:
Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.
"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My resumé's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."
Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.
"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back!"
Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.
In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This year will be the Year of Silverlight on the Desktop! Just you wait!
My impression was that the amount of Olympics streaming using Silverlight was less than YouTube during the same time period. If so, it doesn't seem like much of a success to me.
(Calling it a success because people installed silverlight isn't much. Afterall, the same people would have probably installed a rootkit and trojan in order to watch the Olympic streaming. They just don't care.)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx#sysreq
Platforms for Silverlight 2:
Windows Vista (including Windows Server 2008)
Windows XP SP2
Windows 2000
Windows Server 2003
Mac OS 10.4.8+ (Intel only)
Browsers:
Internet Explorer 6 and 7
FireFox 1.5, 2, and 3
Safari
My video compression blog
Relative to Flash, Silverlight doesn't really bring any more or less to the table from a user's perspective. But as at least one other poster mentioned here, the real power is on the development side of things. Relative to ActionsScript on the Flash side of things, and relative to some weird HTML/CSS/JavaScript combination on the "legacy" side of things, Silverlight is the best, most advanced web development platform I have seen to date, hands down. Sure, there are libraries that help with JavaScript development...YUI, the GWT, etc. But those are slow...and let's face it, the GWT, however effective it might be, is still one big hack for a set of technologies that were never meant to host full-blown applications.
.NET framework. There is a LOT of value here.
With Silverlight, you get a couple key things:
1) Clean division between UI design and implementation. Gone are the days when the UI designer hands over an HTML prototype to the programmer, and the programmer mangles that into a JSP page, PHP page, oor whatever else. In the old world, making changes to the UI design was a mess, unless those changes were limited to CSS. Now the UI designer and developer are both on equal ground -- either can easially import the other's work for updates.
2) You don't have to write your front-end in a crappy language -- or more specifically, in a crappy runtime. Despite all the love that dynamic languages are getting these days, if you look at it, JavaScript's lack of built in libraries, the cumbersome DOM access, and the awful runtime implementation in browers like IE make it a real pain. With Silverlight, a development shop can pick whatever language they see fit -- it could be JavaScript, it could be C#, or it could even be Python or Ruby. And they get the power of a subset of the
3) Good tooling. Having proper tools is of critical importance. You get Visual Studio OR Eclipse on the development side and Expression Blend on the UI design side. I don't know how Expression Blend stacks up against the Adobe products, but I do know that on the development side, Visual Studio is one of just 2-3 top of the line IDEs. I love hacking in emacs as much as the next guy, but any serious large-scale development shop is unlikely to be using emacs or vi or notepad. Having the same tool you use for your back-end development apply to your front-end development is a very, very good thing.
4) Technology that was meant for application UIs. Let's face it: HTML was meant as a document presenation language. Sure, it's been updated over the years and other technologies like CSS have greatly helped. But at its core, it's still not architected to really be an application development platform. And it will never be that, no matter how many bells and whistles you may add.
It's easy to dismiss Silverlight because it's a Microsoft product or whatever. My background is in C and Java, mainly on Linux and Solaris. But Silverlight impressed the hell out of me. So long as they maintain the cross-browser, cross-platform compatibility, I feel it's a perfectly valid choice for developers to make. Keep in mind that competition is a good thing. Firefox was the best thing that ever happened to IE; both browsers now motivate improvements in the other. The same applies between Flash and Silverlight. It will be interesting to see whether Silverlight sees more widespread adoption going forward.
-James