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Silverlight 2.0 Released
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Oct 19, 2008 02:58 PM
from the opposite-of-sun dept.
from the opposite-of-sun dept.
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."
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About time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About time (Score:5, Interesting)
Silverlight 1.0 should never have come out. Silverlight 1.0 vs Silverlight 2.0 is like comparing Flash to Flex, and make the gab between the two 5 times wider. SL1.0 was useless as hell, and even several of Microsoft's more vocal employees and public figures said that much. It was just something the marketing dep pushed when development of SL2.0 was taking too long. And that same marketing dep messed up big time.
Fortunately, Silverlight 2.0 (which really should be SL 1.0) actually has -some- features.
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This is the year! (Score:5, Funny)
This year will be the Year of Silverlight on the Desktop! Just you wait!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Silverlight on the desktop" would be WPF [microsoft.com] and XAML [microsoft.com].
Actually, that was last year.
Re:W00t! (Score:4, Informative)
No need :) There's even development tools that will run on non-windows platforms (funded by Microsoft mind you, but still)
http://www.eclipse4sl.org/#features [eclipse4sl.org]
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And nothing of value (Score:4, Insightful)
was gained.
Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
I was more excited to hear Garfield The Movie was getting a sequel.
Silverlight $NEXT_VERSION will trounce all comers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Silverlight $NEXT_VERSION will trounce all come (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Silverlight $NEXT_VERSION will trounce all come (Score:5, Informative)
Full version up now [today.com]:
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.
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Javascript communication (Score:4, Funny)
We're looking for a replacement for canvas in IE. excanvas sucks. We could use flash, but the Javascriptflash interface is very slow. (It serializes to XML twice.) Is Silverlight's any better?
Oh this is too precious! (Score:4, Insightful)
From the silverlight terms of agreement:
You may not
 work around any technical limitations in the software;
There - right there - it says that if your computer is limited by this software you may not find a way to fix it!
Oh my goodness! I am so glad I got "your browser or hardware is incompatible with silverlight" or some generic message when I browsed to the silverlight page...
I wonder if "not allowed to work around" includes uninstalling it...
7. SUPPORT SERVICES. Because this software is âoeas is,â we may not provide support services for it.
So if it breaks your computer you are on your own!
Oh dear - what a chuckle. Trusted computing my left buttock.
I thought the Olympics was a silverlight failure? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
And...where's Moonlight 1.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure that Microsoft kindly shared the specs for SilverLight 2.0 with Mono/Novell during the development so that the Mono project would not have to play catch-up once 2.0 came out. Right?
Otherwise, Microsoft would be releasing a technology that will only work reliably on Windows and shun the other major platforms.
Hum... I wonder why they just don't do like Adobe or Sun and release a version for Linux, Mac and Windows?
Surely, I must be misinterpreting Microsoft's intentions with Silverlight!
Has anyone actually created a Silverlight app? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
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FTA: "Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform...." (Score:3, Funny)
Which platforms are available? XP and Vista?
Re:FTA: "Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform...." (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx#sysreq [microsoft.com]
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
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Re:The Problem (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The Problem (Score:4, Informative)
Negatory. ActiveX was built to interact with the user's computer; such is generally not possible with Silverlight.
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Re:The Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever tried using Flash *heavily* in a web application?
ActionScript is an abomination, at best.
I'll take Silverlight over Flash for that simple reason.
I'd still prefer neither.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a way to bind web sites to Windows, so it's of great value... to Microsoft.
Re:My prediction: Silverlight will be like Windows (Score:5, Informative)
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...)
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Re:Neat, but... (Score:5, Informative)
...call me again when Mono has an implementation.
I couldn't find your phone number, but here you go [mono-project.com] -- Mono project's Moonlight, the open source implementation of Silverlight.
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