San Francisco — Microsoft’s challenger to Adobe Flash, Silverlight, has officially been planned to launch Silverlight 3 on Friday at an event in San Francisco, but Microsoft silently made the final code for the latest version of its Silverlight 3 runtime for users and software development kit (SDK) for programmers have been published to the web and were available for download as of Thursday afternoon.
The official, “invitation only” release of Microsoft’s Silverlight 3, its competitor to Adobe’s Flash comes ahead of massive Worldwide Partner Conference, and is now available to the public for download from Microsoft’s servers.
Silverlight 3’s launch festivity, however, would not take place until 10 a.m. Friday at San Francisco’s luxurious Intercontinental Hotel. According to an e-mail accompanying the invitation, the roll out will be hosted by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform, and Soma Somasegar, senior vice president of the developer division.
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media experiences and interactive applications for the Web. The version three bridges many gaps in Microsoft’s player that have held it back against Flash. The latest release includes major media enhancements, including H.264 video support as well as 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration. It will also run applications outside a browser, including on mobile devices.
In general, this latest version should finally provide an alternative for Microsoft’s design partners who are fed-up of handing off media and interface work to Flash experts. Features added to version three is integration with a browser’s forward and back button, ClearType for Windows and Mac, hardware acceleration, the ability to work offline and run outside the browser without an additional download. Plus there is support for touch-based input.
Microsoft unveiled the first version of Silverlight 3 beta in March at its MIX09 conference and boasted its ability to run Silverlight applications outside the browser for the first time. In April, Microsoft registered about 300 million downloads of Silverlight between September 2007 and April 2009, with an estimated 300,000 developers and engineers working off the Silverlight platform.
Microsoft considers Silverlight’s digital content distribution capabilities enabling multiple business models, including Microsoft’s Live, on demand, download, and subscription-based models.
Microsoft, in the past has said that Silverlight would “light up” features in Office Web applications. It will deliver sharp images, easy incorporation with Office Live Workspace to upload multiple files, and also the ability to share and edit documents simultaneously in real time.
Silverlight, according to Microsoft, is also an important part of its online services. The player will enable a web-based version of Microsoft’s Office suite called Office Web applications, unveiled last October.
Microsoft was unable to comment on the release of Office Web applications at the time of writing.