Silverlight 1.0 Released, Plans for 1.1, and Microsoft / Novell Officially Collaborate on Silverlight for Linux

By Michael Foord -
A flurry of 'official' news on Silverlight.

Silverlight 1.0 has just been released and Scott Guthrie has outlined the plans for Silverlight 1.1:

Now that Silverlight 1.0 is out the door, my team is cranking hard on our Silverlight 1.1 release.

Silverlight 1.1 will include a cross-platform version of the .NET Framework, and will enable a rich .NET development experience in the browser. It will support a WPF programming model for UI - including support for an extensible control model, layout management, data-binding, control skinning, and a rich set of built-in controls. It will also include a subset of the full .NET Framework base class library you use today, including support for collections, generics, IO, threading, globalization, networking (including sockets, web-services and REST support), HTML DOM, XML, local storage, and LINQ.

You'll be able to use any .NET language to develop a Silverlight application (VB, C#, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Pascal, and more). It is going to really open up a lot of new development opportunities.
Silverlight currently supports Windows and Mac OS. The Mono team have been working hard on a 1.1 compatible release that supports Linux, called Moonlight.

Microsoft have now decided that this will be the 'official' way that Linux is supported and are collaborating with the Mono team on Moonlight:
The highlights of the collaboration are:
  • Microsoft will give Novell access to the test suites for Silverlight to ensure that we have a compatible specification. The same test suite that Microsoft uses for Silverlight.
  • Microsoft will give us access to the Silverlight specifications: details that might be necessary to implement 1.0, beyond what is currently published on the web; and specifications on the 1.1 version of Silverlight as it is updated.
  • Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser (sorry, those are the rules for the Media codecs).
  • Novell will implement Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 and will distribute it for the major Linux distributions at the time of the shipment. We will offer some kind of one-click install for Linux users (no "Open a terminal and type su followed by your password..." as well as RPM and DEB packages for the major distros and operating systems.
Hopefully all the shared specifications might see full docs for the CoreCLR APIs (shipped with 1.1) arrive a bit sooner...

An important part of developing websites that use Silverlight is the desgn tool Expression Blend. There are free betas of this available, but it is a commercial product and is not cross-platform.

The Mono team are also developing a desgn product, called the Moonlight Designer.

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