Microsoft springs 'Flash killer' with Linux flourish

By John Fontana, Network World, 09/05/07

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Microsoft as expected shipped its Silverlight 1.0 multimedia browser plug-in Wednesday and added an unexpected spin by saying it would work with Novell to create support on the Linux platform.

Silverlight is a programming model and a runtime browser plug-in to support Web-based applications that use animation, video and other rich media. It is an extension of Microsoft’s .Net family of tools and runtime environments and has been described as a competitor to Adobe Flash.

Microsoft is hoping to woo three core audiences with Silverlight: content providers that want to distribute video and rich media over the Web; designers and developers who are building rich interactive applications; and end users who want the best possible experience when viewing Web-based media.

The company has been presenting a variety of slick Silverlight demos the past few months, including one showcasing a Major League Baseball game running in the browser. The interface features a number of user controls, a picture-in-a-picture capability and the ability for real-time communication with other users online.

As part of Wednesday’s release, Microsoft also unveiled Silverlight projects run on Web sites from Entertainment Tonight, HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment.

“With Silverlight you can produce quality sites with a level of interaction that before would have been very expensive to produce,” says Andrew Whiddett, vice president of interactive technology at design studio IdentityMine and the leader of the project that created the Entertainment Tonight site. The site, which highlights the Emmys, was produced in only 11 days, says Whiddett, including Web-based drag-and-drop capabilities.

“Whether it is an inventory management system application or a sophisticated video application, the end goal is the same: You want to make it easy for people to interact with the site and you want to make it easy to deploy,” says Whiddett. And he says more is coming in the next revision of Silverlight, which adds the ability to develop the underpinnings of Web sites as components. That feature will allow for reuse and shorten development time.

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