Mono Coders Hack Linux Silverlight in 21 Days 409
Etrigoth writes "After the recent announcement of Silverlight by Microsoft at their Mix event in Vegas, Miguel de Icaza
galvanised his team of developers in the Mono group at Novell to create a Linux implementation, a so-called 'Moonlight'.
Remarkably, they achieved this in 21 Days.
Although they were first introduced to Silverlight at the Las Vegas Mix, de Icaza was invited by a representative of Microsoft France for a
10 minute demonstration at the Paris Re-Mix 07 keynote conference, should they have anything to show.
Joshua, a blogger for Microsoft has confirmed that the Mono team did not know anything about Silverlight 1.1 before its launch. Other members of this team have blogged about this incredible achievement, Moonlight hack-a-thon. It's worth noting from a developer perspective that Moonlight is not Mono and doesn't require Mono to work"
Joshua, a blogger for Microsoft has confirmed that the Mono team did not know anything about Silverlight 1.1 before its launch. Other members of this team have blogged about this incredible achievement, Moonlight hack-a-thon. It's worth noting from a developer perspective that Moonlight is not Mono and doesn't require Mono to work"
Wonderful (Score:4, Interesting)
Regardless though, having a native solution is always good.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as web software, adobe is the epitome of crap. MS takes 2nd place.
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Informative)
No, Adobe, we haven't forgotten.
The name (Score:2)
Of course my favortite suggestion has the same problem: MONOchrome.
Suggestions:
"monochrome" instead of silverlight. (ie. whitelight versus single frequency). Of course those opposed to it might call it silverblight.
Other possibilities:
flash-light
silver-lux
silver-tux
silvix
sliver
Re: (Score:2)
I like the merging of two ideas in your flashlight suggestion, but Adobe might take issue with it.
Another off-the-cuff idea:
mithrilight -- named for an even higher quality (albeit fictional) silver: mithril.
Re:The name (Score:4, Funny)
What's wrong with Monopolight?
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Informative)
-Rick
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Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Informative)
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With that being said, it'll be a rough road ahead for MS. It's hard to beat the ~98% penetration that Flash has.
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Informative)
For one thing, Silverlight supports the VC-1 codec. This would allow embedded HD video which Flash currently can't handle.
Ever since Adobe started using the On2 codec, HD Flash is not a problem. We just shipped several HD clips in Flash for a job and they looked great.
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Informative)
I've been demoing 720p HD streaming to Silverlight at 4 Mbps. It works fine today (and Silverlight 1.0 is still only in public beta).
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
I just watched the video. I saw nothing that Flash couldn't do, much less anything that Shockwave couldn't do.
The reason why Flash is popular isn't because you can create complicated applications with it. (You can, but nobody uses them.) The reason why it's popular is because it's small, fast, and has a very large, cross-platform installed base. Silverlight isn't any of those three.
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- Silverlight is gravy for VB and C# developers, and the
- Microsoft will offer very appealing Silverlight hosting plans for the multimedia content -- wh
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http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=6005 [zdnet.com]
References a page on Macromedia.com which now only shows 2006 stats but I don't see why they'd post a blatant lie. In 2004 Flash had well over 90% penetration in US and Europe.
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I disagree; YouTube used Flash because Flash was popular.
I refer you to the Flash penetration statistics Adobe keeps:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flash
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
And why did YouTube decide on Flash as their standard? Because Flash plugins were mature and reliable, worked well with all leading browsers and OS platforms, and even came pre-installed with many browser distros. Because it allowed them to avoid the game of "Select your poison: Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime?" that users at previous video sites had to play. Because tools for generating and publishing Flash content were not onerously expensive.
Is Silverlight any of these things yet?
Already better tools for Silverlight (Score:3, Interesting)
It's video experience is Windows Media, which has been shipping for years and is more widely available than good
For tools, there's the Expression suite
Re:Already better tools for Silverlight (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not supposed to be an "fulfill my unreasonable demands or else!1" flame, but really, Adobe has set a certain standard for interoperability and if Silverlight doesn't live up to that standard it's yet another Windows-only technology that no sane web developer will use because Flash does the same on more platforms. After all, ActiveX has done what Silverlight does now for quite a while, if the user was ready to accept the security issues.
(By the way, a codec developer who uses the term "video experience" to describe a container format/video codec? Microsoft's PR department must make some really good Kool-Aid!)
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Flash videos are just incredibly annoying. Inevitably I just figure out the url for the flv file and download it so that it can be played with mplayer.
Video shouldn't require a plug-in to work. And if it does they could at least make it more widely available...
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Did you really just compare Adobe to Microsoft in terms of poor Linux support? If Silverlight becomes workable on Linux, it'll be because a group of hackers reverse-engineered and re-implemented it, not because MS gives a shit about Linux. If you're going to judge these techs by their third-party open-source implementations, then you should be talking about the several free flash players that are
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just so happens to work on my machine.
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
Miguel has not taken anything away from Linux, everything he's done has added to the choices we have. I would rather have an open-source implementation of Silverlight for Linux than have no implementation or a closed-source implementation. If you don't like Silverlight, don't install Moonlight, but don't presume to tell me if I should or should not use it.
If anything, Miguel has just proven that even if Microsoft keeps changing the API, the Mono team can keep up.
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IMO, Miguel is just leading his followers to slaughter. History tells me this is the how Microsoft do
Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
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"... I'm doing this on Windows Vista and Internet Explorer, but you can just as easily do this on Windows XP, Firefox, or even a Mac in - [audio suddenly cuts off]
I suppose he was going to say Safari? In any case it was sloppy editing.
He must not have edited this with Silverlight, because Silverlight makes precision editing so easy.
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I'll have to wait for someone to upload that to YouTube so I can watch it.
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Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)
Oh the irony...
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
Court: "Microsoft, you've been found guilty of anti-competitive and monopolistic practices. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Microsoft looks at the floor, hands in pockets, mumbles "Sorry...."
Court: "Well, don't let it happen again!"
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MS could drop IE 32 and no one could do anything about it. They are not required to ship a product just so a plugin by another company can continue to exist. Not shipping IE 32 does not stop Adobe from making 64bit flash for IE 64
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No, but using your monopoly power to suffocate another company's product in a different market is.
Microsoft sees themselves as being under attack from companies trying move userland away from the OS as a key platform, Google with their AJAX apps, Sun with Java, Adobe with Flash, and so on. If any or all of these succeed, Microsoft's control, and therefore their ability to make those 85% prof
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
But that being said, Apple hasn't been bitchslapped or even investigated for the charges I read about from time to time, about early on how Jobs manufactured an iPod shortage to enrich Apple's margins. That kind of amazes me, because I'll read about that from time to time in articles that praise Jobs performance since he got back. I suspect that if that and the mandatory minimum pricing on the iPods isn't considered to be fodder for antitrust suits, I doubt that MS should be smacked for removing an insecure browser from the market. Even if it does harm the competition or consumer.
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Informative)
First off, despite what you may have heard, in the US at least, monopolies are not illegal. If by fair competition you become the only player on the block, you are not subject to antitrust law. If, however, you use your monopoly position to create barriers to entry into the market (other than the natural barriers caused by competition) or if you use your monopoly in one market to unfairly compete in another market, you may be subject to antitrust law.
With regards to Apple -- and for the record, I am not a fanboy, I don't own an iPod and I run Debian on my Thinkpad -- there is very little evidence that they have a monopoly anywhere at all. First: the iPod is not a monopoly. This seems to be very difficult for some Slashdotters to grasp. Yes, it is by far and away the most popular digital music player on the market today, but it is not the only one. And it isn't like the only alternative is Microsoft's Zune or some other non-profitable offering subsidized by a powerful company trying to break into the market, either. There are literally thousands of competitive offerings, with the same feature set as the iPod, many of them technically superior in pretty much every way to the iPod, that are cheaper to boot. People in the US don't seem to buy them much, but they most certainly are available. The barriers to entry in the digital music player market are extremely low, and there is nothing whatsoever about Apple's dominance that changes that. Companies like Creative, iRiver, and countless other small no-name brands from China manage to remain profitable, although their volumes are somewhat lower than Apple's. But hey, newsflash: most markets have a dominant player. That doesn't mean the dominant player has a monopoly, and even if it they did, it doesn't mean they obtained that monopoly unfairly or that they're abusing their monopoly to fix prices.
The only semi-possible charge related to antitrust law that has ever been levied against Apple is with regards to their Fairplay DRM, which is only available on the iPod, and which allegedly causes vendor lock-in. Well, there's a big reason that no one ever pursues this: it's a non-starter. Many competing music players play AAC without DRM these days, and according to Apple's own data, the overwhelming majority of music on people's iPods does not come from the iTunes music store, which is pretty much the only place that you might get AAC + Fairplay tracks. Unless you put DRM on your own tracks -- and who does that -- most music is still ripped from people's own CD collection or obtained illegally via P2P or similar.
These complaints about Fairplay also ignore the glaringly obvious: pretty much any proprietary software package also has proprietary file formats, many of which are deliberately obfuscated, precisely in order to lock users into their products. Reading Microsoft hackers' own experiences reverse engineering the WordPerfect document formats back when that product was dominant is extremely illustrative in this regard. (The fact that I'm pointing out that this is standard industry practice should not in any way be construed as support for said practice; I am in favor of open document formats precisely because I disagree with vendor lock-in. But the fact remains: this sort of thing, by itself, is not an antitrust violation.)
In fact, my iRiver (which I purchased because it supports Ogg Vorbis and love) supports some DRM-laden format of its own, IRM or somesuch, which
Re:Closer to the subject than anti-trust. (Score:4, Funny)
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All this assuming, of course, that anti-trust laws in the US are still valid (which is debatable, due to selective and half-hearted enforcement).
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Insightful)
All they have to do is yank iexplore32 and Firefox wins overnight.
There, fixed that for you.
Why?! (Score:3, Insightful)
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So we are trading a closed plugin from Adobe with an FOSS plug in based on a standard from Microsoft.
Flash is just plan nasty and Adobe doesn't support 64-bit Linux. This is FOSS so it can Support Linux, BSD, and run on CPUs beside the X86.
IF Adobe would make the flash player FOSS then Microsoft wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
So yes you are right but I have to ask what is the problem with killing Flash?
Yea I want my SVG and Theora tags to replace Flash and Silverlight but I just don't see that h
Re:Why?! (Score:4, Insightful)
But the problem with creating a FOSS version of Flash is that it's a matter of catch-up. With Silverlight, this team of coders is showing that they can keep up. Thus, instead of being behind in their implementation, they are showing that they can always deliver a feature-complete alternate (and FOSS) implementation.
Frankly I hope this displaces flash to some extent. Even if it gives MS's platform more exposure, it won't matter as long as there is also a feature-complete FOSS implementation. Creating marketplace competition is always good... and in this case we have competition to MS's Silverlight, and competition to Flash. This is good. I highly doubt that Microsoft expected or wanted this to happen. In fact, nothing could be worse for their longterm goals than for a FOSS equivalent to be as good (or maybe better?) than their implementation. Having a competing implementation, used by many people, will mean that they cannot "embrace and extend" and cannot lock people into their products. After all, if they try to change the Silverlight standard, who is to say whether the MS implementation or the FOSS implementation will become the defacto standard?
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Frankly I am one of those people. If Adobe provided a good Linux flash player I would be fine with that. However Adobe doesn't support 64 bit Linux.
They have finely put enough effort into Linux to provide a the latest and greatest version to Linux users but no 64 bit version.
Also no version for Linux on the ARM.
This might actually be a good thing. Not great but good.
Then port Moonlight to Windows in 21 days (Score:3, Interesting)
Then we need to port Moonlight to Windows (and every other platform), so that the MS implementation isn't hte one that's mostly used. Otherwise, MS can just extend their own version in whatever way
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If anything, it at least keeps Linux as a viable desktop alternative. It's difficult for any desktop to keep mainstream if it can't do the ba
Re:Why?! (Score:4, Insightful)
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They would've ported it to Linux anyway. Now they just don't have to. Maybe saved Microsoft some bucks, that's all there is.
But the implementation is open source. You wouldn't think Miguel would port the entirety of
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"Miguel de Icaza" account is an imposter (Score:5, Informative)
This is a shame, because that person has been flaming everywhere.
The slashdot admins have said that they can not do anything about it.
Re:Why?! (Score:5, Insightful)
From http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/ [adobe.com]
"This license does not permit the usage of the specification to create software which supports SWF file playback."
It's a bit like having a research library that permits you access to any book you want, as long as your paper doesn't cite one as a reference.
May I be the first... (Score:3, Insightful)
Gives an insight into what Open Source is capable of.
Y
Re:May I be the first... (Score:4, Insightful)
Would Miguel's team not have been able to code this under a closed license? Was there significant public involvement that was critical to the project?
Also, what was accomplished? A 100% direct rip-off of a product already created and demonstrated by a closed-source development house? Impressive. Wow.
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No, and no. What's your point? GP said it showed what OS was capable of, not what closed-source wasn't.
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Well, for one they are using ffmpeg, and cairo, so I would say that there is significant involvement.
At the moment moonlight may not have any significant functionality over silverlight, but one example given of the value of the mono work is that in time you will be able to ship mono
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We already knew that Open Source devs are capable of cloning the work of others.
ah, the free linux version of silverlight (Score:3, Informative)
I just didn't realize they had been planning on achieving that goal by getting a bunch of OSS coders to do all their work for them for free.
Oh well, probably better this way, since it might remain capital-F Free. What's the Moonlight license, anyway?
If this _is_ a "FREE" implementation of Silverlight it really will start to look like a nicer alternative to the poorly-supported, closed-source Flash for Linux.
Re:ah, the free linux version of silverlight (Score:4, Insightful)
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I see that I got modded troll for this comment. Is that not what they did?
It's merely a statement of fact, I didn't make any judgment call here.. in fact, in the sentence following it I discussed how actually that may be the best way they could have approached the situation anyways. Silly mods.
Cool, but ultimately pointless (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cool, but ultimately pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
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However, Mono's claim was never that it would be ahead of Dotnet, but always that it was equivalent:
Mono is an open source implementation of
Mono is built on open standards etc.
of course it never was, is not, and never will be - that is the objection.
Microsoft would always be in the driving seat and other implementations also-rans that would never be certified by software makers.
But this is all academic now that the patent threats which
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How many asp.net running apache/linux do you see on the web? None.
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These guys are just doing to MS what MS has typically done in the past: Latch onto something successful and take the ride. It's amazingly hard to get something truly innovative into common usage. It's a lot easier to latch onto a rising star, then follow it to the top and do it just a little better.
What's 'better' in this case? How about fewer bugs and vulnerabilities, as well as working on more br
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Of course "Mono & Co" will always be lagging behind.. What, you expect the re-implementation to come before the original? Regardless, is a lag of 21 days really a dealbreaker here? You didn't buy Vista the day it was released did you? Lighten up on the blanket defeatism, sheesh. It's not War and Peace.
As a desktop Linux user of many years, I couldn't care if Satan himself made an
Re:Cool, but ultimately pointless (Score:4, Informative)
Well, certainly at the core of what Silverlight can do, we are following Microsoft direction, but we have already taken Silverlight in new directions, for example we are able to use it to extend Gtk# applications and to create desklets. Both things that were not initially supported by Silverlight.
What is Silverlight? (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, Silverlight is a Microsoft product [microsoft.com], and is some kind of plug-in related to "media experiences and rich interactive applications for the web", according to the above page. Not finding that especially enlightening, I clicked on the FAQ [microsoft.com], where the first question is "What is Silverlight?" [microsoft.com]. Great! Unfortunately it yielded a "We're sorry, the page you requested could not be found" error. Maybe I need Javascript turned on or something? Ah. There we go. [Shrug] Huh? Same terse verbiage-filled useless description as before. Thanks for nothing. Other information on the FAQ page imply streaming of content using "Windows Streaming is another major goal of the product, complete with fancy DRM [weak Golf clapping].
So, I'm still not 100% sure, but I think it's trying to emulate the typical user experience with Flash, including the ungraceful handling of missing/disabled browser features
Oh. I did find out that the Microsoft definition of "cross-platform" is Windows (versions unspecified) and Mac OS X 10.4.8+ (Intel and PPC), but they say they are considering wider support.
Favorite buzzword phrase: "free cloud-based hosting and streaming solution".
Cloud-based? I haven't heard that one before.
Re:What is Silverlight? (Score:5, Funny)
Cloud-based? I haven't heard that one before.
Vapourware.
Stupid Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
I have Mac OS X 10.4.10 - like most people who installed the latest patches.
I guess the six-character string "10.4.1" is less than the string "10.4.8"...
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I'd imagine that very few of the applications that leverage this will see the public Internet.
What goes around comes around (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that Moonlight is finished Miguel and his team should, having listened to customer demand (I believe that's the excuse Microsoft always uses), build some Free extensions on to Microsoft's work. Meaning the best experience can only be had by people running Moonlight under GNU/Linux and that some functionality will be unavailable to other platforms.
Gosh, does that mean people will be locked-in to using GNU/Linux? Well Microsoft could use the GPL'ed code if they want to! We'll call it 'Freedom lockin'. :)
You Have to Put Silverlight in a Dominant Position (Score:3, Insightful)
Creating Moonlight assumes that there is going to be lots of web content made for Silverlight, and this assumes that Silverlight will be put in a fairly dominant position on the web in the not too distant future as a result. Silverlight is not a open web standard, nor is XAML, and its future development is always controlled by Microsoft.
I just don't think people think through what the ultimate aims, goals and endgames are for things like this regarding open source software.
Congratulations (Score:4, Insightful)
But just preemptively want to explain why is the development timeframe difference between MS and Linux (because I see stupid uninformed posts coming, it's Slashdot after all).
What these guys did, is take Mono (for Linux), and make a standalone subset of it, Silverlight (for Linux). So there aren't huge surprises here.
On the Microsoft side of the story, it's different: they had to first sit down and figure out what the subset will be. Then they had to count the bytes (literally) of every feature they include, since for proper mainstream deployment, the plugin should be as small as possible (I won't be surprised if Moonlight is not something like twice the size of Silverlight or more).
Then they had to make it work on Mac, where they didn't have a port of
Good job Miguel! (Score:2)
If we want silverlight to suceed it must be multiplatform.
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One has to wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
And Gnash is still not finished (Score:3, Interesting)
If only our OSS Microsoft Fanboy Midguel would galvanize his team to implement an entire pipeline of Flash tools, generators and Players. If MS doesn't kill this one off and a viable Kit of OSS tools & players for Silverlight comes to life I might even drop Flash RIA for it.
But no way, for as long as I live, will I support an non-open RIA standard that MS has total control over. I'd rather mess with Adobes crappy Flash IDE for another 10 years.
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Regardless, this is absolutely freaking impressive. Microsoft has been pimping Silverlight pretty hard around our shop, and to be honest the only reason I ever saw for Microsoft to create .net is good old fashioned "vendor lock-in". I saw Silverlight as more of the same, and I am just impres
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While that's funny 'round these parts, Microsoft is really pushing hard for quality code on the inside. They're implementing processes on top of processes to create new processes to improve the quality of their software (or so they think.) And they're succeeding in a lot of ways -- the code they ship now as "1.0" is far better than any of their previous 1.0 offerings.
Internally they're killing off the cowboy coders tha
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Re:The MS teams (Score:5, Informative)
-Rick
No Mono in Moonlight (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No Mono in Moonlight (Score:4, Informative)
Correct, it does not need or use Mono because it IS Mono. It is a stripped down version of Mono. Mono is coded in C++, thus Moonlight is coded in C++.
-Rick
Re:No Mono in Moonlight (Score:5, Informative)
The Moonlight rendering engine is written in C++, this is the piece that can be used without Mono, although for most things you will want Mono.
The binding to link the engine to Mono is written in C#.
Re:The MS teams (Score:4, Informative)
Re:And the novelty is... ? (Score:5, Informative)
If it had been done on a normal time scale, the novelty here would be the fact that the implementation exists. But considering it was done in three weeks, instead of six months, shows the sheer speed and effectiveness that Miguel's teams demonstrate.
Re:And the novelty is... ? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Linux developers implement in two weeks the compatibility and usability features that Microsoft intentionally left out."
Re:And the novelty is... ? (Score:5, Funny)
Strictly speaking, Linux developers copied Microsoft's copy of a product acquired by Adobe from FutureSplash via Macromedia.
Re:And the novelty is... ? (Score:5, Funny)
That's not strict at all.
Microsoft used their copy of Java (.NET) to create a copy of FutureSplash which Adobe acquired via Macromedia, and Linux developers used their copy of Microsoft's copy of Java (.NET) to create a copy of the copy of FutureSplash.
Re:And the novelty is... ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's great! (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, Google is our friend!
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Is it just me or did Perl just go away? I love Perl and use it on a daily bases. But it seems like of lot of things are going the route of Python and Ruby. When did this happen?
Time to pick up a Ruby on Rails and Python book.
Re:Not good enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
The opcodes of the machine are documented on the standard ECMA 335.
The standard libaries and browser APIs are available from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com] a lot of the documentation is still under development for Silverlight 1.1 (1.0 is much more complete) so for a few things that are new in 1.1, you have to guess what they are, or look it up in the WPF docs (which is where stuff ultimately came from).
The format of the Silverlight compiled scripts is documented in ECMA 335 as well.
clicky (Score:2)
-Rick
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Silverlight [silverlightsource.com], a Wiccan coven in North Carolina.
Terry Silverlight [drummerworld.com], a drummer/composer/producer/arranger/educator.
Silverlight [carlsguides.com], a weapon in the Runescape MMORPG.
Want more? I'm sure I could drag up plenty from the depths of search engine hell. Hell, I could even do a tag search on flickr, I'm sure that would be amusing.
At any rate, you've all the resources at your fingertips
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