Silverlight 2.0 Released 164
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."
About time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Neat, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
If current progress is any indicator, you'll be in business roughly 2015-16.
I can't wait!
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.
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!
Re:The Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a way to bind web sites to Windows, so it's of great value... to Microsoft.
Time for a GUI revolution (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps its time to skip the HTML browser and create a "GUI browser" that is designed for decent GUI's from the ground up. That way we don't have to worry about whether MS will support it or not.
Re:This is the year! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Silverlight on the desktop" would be WPF [microsoft.com] and XAML [microsoft.com].
Actually, that was last year.
Re:About time (Score:3, Insightful)
If people had the choice - Silverlight or Flash video then 99% of people would have used Flash, simply because they already had it ... the people who installed Silverlight to watch these will probably never use it again (until they need to watch something else that is Silverlight only)
It doesn't matter, mission accomplished. It's on more desktops so more developers will be tempted to use it, especially if the developer tools are half-way decent (by all accounts they are).
Once upon a time people would have been happy to use Java and only installed Flash for the odd website that wouldn't work with anything else and would probably never had any intention to use it again, apart from when they came across another Flash website.