Microsoft releases Silverlight 2

Says it reaches one in four consumers worldwide

14 October 2008 10:39 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Microsoft has announced the availability of Silverlight 2, its Flash rival for creation and delivery of browser-based apps.

The company says Silverlight 2 "delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences".

As well as making the platform more open for developers under licence and through a Control Pack, Microsoft says the new version offers improvements with built-in controls, better networking support, more programming language support and added DRM protection.

In addition, cross-browser support now includes support for Mac, Windows and Linux in Firefox, Safari and Windows Internet Explorer.

"We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed", said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft.

"Silverlight represents a radical improvement in the way developers and designers build applications on the Web. This release will further accelerate our efforts to make Silverlight, Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Studio the preeminent solutions for the creation and delivery of media and rich Internet application experiences."

The update can be downloaded now from the Silverlight site, while existing users will get upgraded automatically.

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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! We'll put p*rn on it! Free p*rn!"

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.

(My blog rant: http://tinyurl.com/6rxgnd ) Posted by David Gerard, UK