Microsoft Releases Silverlight, Extends Support to Linux

silverlight,online collaboration,technical communication,flash,elearning,microsoft silverlight,adobe flash player

I’ve been getting stuff done this weekend and now I’m moving this week. So there’s not a lot of blogging time for me and as soon as I post this, I’m packing up the main system for transport.

Silverlight Released Today By Microsoft

I’m interested in the competition this gives the Flash Player and it makes good sense about why Adobe sped up their release.

I’m interested in the direction online learning / eLearning, since most standard education setups use Microsoft products already and the IE Browser wars have been played out, with their ’security setting’ blasting most entrenched Flash projects created with anything earlier than Flash 7.

Note: Don’t think that I believe that Microsoft will not have their own security issues with Silverlight, it’s just that it’s easier for them to put the fix in.

Why Should HAT Authors Know About Silverlight?

I think this is compelling for Technical Communication for several reasons. Overall, the eLearning and Technical Communcation space is going to get richer content through better streaming technologies in the near future.

Silverlight and Flash are those top contending technologies which will have broad, 95% and up penetration of the market. Silverlight is very integrated within the MSFT-included Windows Media Player, not to mention they’re partnering (somewhat) with Linux.

I work with programming teams who do some amazing and proprietary things with Flash, and I’m expecting great things from them because Silverlight is supposed to be more improved than Flash and easier for them to transition into, particularly the Visual Studio users.

Silverlight In Their Own Words

Here’s one of the Silverlight team talking about the experience:

Working on two different product releases – Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 - simultaneously is a very unique experience not easily summarized in a blog post. The kind of stuff this team has done in a matter of months is nothing short of amazing. We joke internally about how someday books will be written about these episodes; and needless to say, about the giants upon whose shoulders people like me stood.

Another Silverlight developer’s blog says it all:

that sound?  yeah, my jaw dropping.  me likey.  oh, and wicked cool halo3 hd video

Here are some excerpts from today’s new Silverlight product press release. Of specific note is the better quality and the ‘tight integration’ speak. You’re going to hear a lot of that ‘tight integration’ speech from user-focused product development teams, because the trend is to have multiple functioning software products working together.

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 4, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today released to the Web (RTW) Silverlight™ 1.0, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the Web. In addition, Microsoft will work with Novell Inc. to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, called Moonlight, and based on the project started on mono-project.com.

Silverlight significantly reduces development and deployment costs and provides enhanced Web audio and video streaming and playback using industry-leading Windows Media® Technologies.

Microsoft unveiled new Silverlight customer experiences on “Entertainment Tonight,” HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment, and also launched the Silverlight Partner Initiative, a program designed to foster collaboration among solution providers, content delivery networks, tools vendors and design agencies.

“Silverlight is a popular new way to build and deliver cross-browser, cross-platform experiences on the Web,” said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of Developer Platforms and leader of the Mono project at Novell. “Novell is excited to work with Microsoft to extend Silverlight beyond Windows® and Macintosh to Linux with Moonlight, so Linux users everywhere can enhance their rich media and interactive experiences on the Web.”

The tight integration between Visual Studio® and Expression Studio allows developers and designers to easily share projects, designs and code to create stunning, high-quality applications faster and in a more cost-effective manner.

In addition to the release of Silverlight 1.0, Microsoft released Expression Encoder 1.0 (formerly Expression Media Encoder), a tool that makes it simple for professionals to encode, enhance and publish rich media content to Silverlight. The intuitive interface allows users to rapidly encode a wide array of file-based media content formats into a Silverlight experience. Expression Encoder also eases production of live events using sought-after features such as multisource switching and publishing of content to services including Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live™.