Silverlight

Finally Microsoft has released Silverlight 1.0 - Microsofts new streaming media platform which aims to compete with Adobe Flash. Silverlight is a cross-platform and cross-browser plugin with focus on delivering high performing graphical web interfaces, with support for Windows and Mac OS. Download the final release here. The download page still says Silverlight 1.0 RC , but the RC will automatically update to the final version. For Linux there is a project under the Mono umbrella called Moonlight which will provide a Linux implementation of Silverlight.

Delay has done it - a Silverlight “proof-of-concept” XPS viewer! Head over to his post and try it out, this might be the start of the cross-platform XPS viewer that we all long for…

This part of the Dissecting XPS series will focus on some XML Paper Specification tools that are available as of today. The success of XPS, vs PDF and others, are really depending on the number of supported devices, operating systems and tools. Right now the XPS support is limitied in applications outside the Microsoft Windows sphere, but there are plans for other operating systems. (Maybe Silverlight will boost this with the CoreCLR).

I initially had some trouble installing Microsoft Silverlight on Windows Vista. It all installed perfectly without any warnings (not during setup nor in the Windows logs), but I could not get the Silverlight 1.0 beta applications to run. I guess that it had something to do with having installed WPF/E betas installed. To get it to work this is what I did… 1: Start a command prompt using elvated privilegies

Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E) is heavily discussed right now, and I really like what I see.. I’m not going to dig in deep here instead I recommend you to read Scott Hanselman’s post on the .NET Ecosystem which I find great. He has put it all into context and thats when I get really excited…