Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2

Written by Ryan Lawler

Monday, October 13. 2008 at 12:10 PM EDT Post a comment

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After months of developer testing, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced today that it is finally releasing Silverlight 2 out into the wild.

With Silverlight, Microsoft hopes to compete against Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE)'s near-ubiquitous Flash player for online video and rich Internet applications. Adobe's Flash holds 73 percent of the market for all online video delivered, according to data from comScore Inc.

Microsoft has seen some early success with Silverlight, however, as the platform was chosen for high-profile events such as the Democratic National Convention and NBC Universal 's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. Both events used Silverlight 2 beta 2 version of the plug-in.

Microsoft also continues to add more functionality to the Silverlight platform. Move Networks Inc. is integrating its video streaming technology with Silverlight, which will allow adaptive bit rate streaming to maximize video performance regardless of a user's connection. Microsoft also recently announced that it would support H.264 video. 

While much of the comparison between Flash and Silverlight has been about the user experience, Microsoft says the biggest difference will be seen in the developer toolkit.

"Silverlight was built on .Net, which has over 4 million developers that know how to use it worldwide," says Brian Goldfarb, director of developer platforms for Microsoft. "This opens up access to a whole new class of people that can use it without learning new skills and technologies."

The newest version of Silverlight includes a few new features, including new skins and a handful of new controls. The newest version is also more open: Goldfarb says Silverlight 2 has an OSI-approved, open-source license that will allow developers to download and play around with it.

"Microsoft is committed to the needs of the broader community," Goldfarb says. "We want more people to be a part of this party."

The Silverlight 2 version of the plug-in will become available on the Silverlight Website tomorrow. For those that have already installed a previous version of the Silverlight plug-in -- whether it's Silverlight 1.0 or the Silverlight 2 beta 2 release used for the Olympics -- will be auto-updated in coming days.