Silverlight 2 is ready

The finished second version of Microsoft's Silverlight, its challenger to Flash, is available to download. While Silverlight 1 was based on a JavaScript interpreter, Silverlight 2 incorporates a slimmed-down version of the .NET framework and runs precompiled code in C#, Visual Basic, Python and Ruby.

Additionally, Silverlight can use web services based on REST, WS-*/SOAP, POX and RSS as well as HTTP. DRM protection of content is also supported. A new feature of the Silverlight plugin is "Deep Zoom": using the scroll wheel or mouse-clicks, you can zoom smoothly into images and collaged panoramas up to 15,000 pixels across. For content creators to make these zoomable images, Microsoft is providing the free Deep Zoom Composer software as a separate download.

Microsoft lists all the differences between Silverlight 1 and 2 in a table on its web site. Silverlight runs in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari under Windows and Mac OS X. Moonlight, the Linux implementation, whose development is supported by Microsoft, is currently only available in version 0.7.

Although Microsoft intended Silverlight content to be created using its Windows creative package, Expression Studio, it is nevertheless supporting a project by French company Soyatec, which aims to add free Silverlight tools to Eclipse, the cross-platform open source development environment, a pre-release version of which is already available now.

Microsoft further says it plans to disclose the technical specification for the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) vocabulary on which Silverlight is based on MSDN. The Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) contains further user-interface components, such as hierarchical lists and automatic completion, under a Microsoft Permissive License.

(jbe)