Roadmap for Moonlight 2.0

Miguel de Icaza, the Novell manager for Moonlight development, provides a glimpse at the future of Moonlight in a post on his blog. Moonlight, the Linux equivalent to Microsoft's Silverlight, was released, as a preview, just in time for Linux users to stream the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States and has now reached version 1.0. Moonlight 1.0 now passes all of the Microsoft regression test suites and ships with support for Microsoft's Media Pack for x86 and x86-64 architectures. Version 2.0 is based on Silverlight 2.0 and is currently being worked on by developers.

While Silverlight 1.0 was based on a JavaScript interpreter, Silverlight 2 incorporates a slimmed-down version of the .NET framework and runs pre-compiled code in C#, Visual Basic, Python and Ruby. Moonlight 2.0 will also include the ability to run the pre-compiled code, allowing it to run Silverlight 2.0 based applications. Microsoft has "open sourced the Microsoft DLR, the Microsoft MEF framework and the crown jewels: the Microsoft Silverlight Control Library and the Control Toolkit, under the OSI-approved MS-PL licenses" to help the team further develop Moonlight.

The first preview for Moonlight 2.0 will be shown at Microsoft's Mix09 developers conference in mid-March, at which Microsoft will also preview Silverlight 3.0. A final version of Moonlight 2.0 is expected at the end of the year.

(crve)