- Posted by christhi on January 20, 2009
The official streaming feed of Barak Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Committee will be using Silverlight 2!! This news was great for SilverLight 2.0 users (Mac on Intel and Windows) howerver using managed code in the player originally left out Linux users of the Moonlight 1.0 beta, as well as PowerPC Mac users. To support the widest platform possible Microsoft has teamed up with the Moonlight team at Novell and they've created a Silverlight 1.0 version of the player that works great in both Moonlight and PowerPC Macs. The only limitation is that the SL1 player can only produce a 500 Kbps stream and lacks managed code however the experience should be close to those running SL2.
The Silverlight 1.0 compatible player is low live at:
http://www.pic2009.org/page/content/linuxplayer
Note that this player is only for Silverlight 1.0 and doesn't work with Internet Explorer. The Silverlight 2.0 player for Windows or Intel Mac is at:
http://www.pic2009.org/page/content/live
- Posted by christhi on November 18, 2008
SilverLight is generating a ton of momemtum recently and when I first heard that 1 in 4 computers now has SilverLight installed I was blown away. I knew it would eventually happend but I had no idea it would reach this level so quickly. In my day to day dealings with custom development shops, design agencies, and customers I'm hearing the same thing over and over again that is "we are beginning to look seriously at SilverLight as an option" and not just for video. SilverLight 1 was sort of touted as the "Video" release as building full fledged LOB business applications or RIA were more challenging given the lack of .NET code behind. Now with SilverLight shipping last month that changed and it has changed in a big way. Not only can you develop SilverLight 2 applications with .NET code behind but with the release of SP1 for Expression Blend it is now easier than ever to do so. You have advanced controls such a datagrid and calendars as well as a myriad of other controls being release in the form of toolkits distributed as open source. Check out SilverLight 2 Toolkit at http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight, there you can find a charting control, expander, auto complete box, and treeview to name a few and the list keeps growing.
The SilverLight wave is also directly aimed at providing pure line of business frameworks and samples with the likes of Prism 2.0 (www.codeplex.com/prism) for building composite applications in SilverLight (as well as WPF), and vertically targeted LOB samples such as our Microsoft Common UI for Healtcare which you can also download from codeplex (www.mscui.com to run the demos) and (http://www.codeplex.com/mscui) to download the code samples and source code.
SilverLight is also being deployed at an incredible rate within the firewall at our enterprise customers with Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update so we can deploy SilverLight on the desktops in a seemless fashion.
Aside from the competive advantage of enabling better developer/designer workflow, SilverLight 2 provides other unique features such as support for "adaptive streaming". Adaptive streaming will be integrated as part of IIS7 and "Smooth Streaming" (HD quality video over the web) that will enable video to be delivered at multiple bit rates up to 2.5Mbits. You may have witnessed our adaptive streaming technology when watching the Olympics on msnbc.com which served over 3500 hours of live and on-demand action to over 60 million unique visitors this summer and that was only at a max 1.5 Mbits bitrates imagine with 2.5Mbits will offer.
The net of it is that my customers and partners are taking SilverLight seriously today with v2 and are having tremendous success doing it such as the recent announcement of BlockBuster replacing Flash with SilverLight for its MovieLink application or NetFlix with its instant watch service. I am very much looking forward to what lies ahead in SilverLight 3 (which I will be writing about next).