New Moonlight release available for testing

Technology that puts Silverlight on Linux includes support for both Silverlight 2.0 and 3.0 features

By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service, 05/06/09

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A new version of the Moonlight open-source technology that puts Silverlight on Linux is now available for developers to test.

Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform runtime and development technology for running Web-based multimedia applications.

According to a blog post by Miguel de Icaza, Novell developer platform vice president and founder of the Mono open-source project, the preview of Moonlight 2.0 is not feature-complete and does not pass all the requirements needed to fully implement Silverlight on Linux.

What the Moonlight 2.0 preview does give developers is a glimpse of how they can leverage Silverlight 2.0 features on Linux, as well as features of the forthcoming 3.0 release now in beta, according to de Icaza.

Microsoft and Novell collaborated on Moonlight, which is part of the Mono project, a cross-platform, open-source development framework for Microsoft's proprietary .Net platform. Moonlight 1.0 was released in February.

The preview gives developers the ability to develop write applications entirely in Unix if they install Mono's 2.4 release and the full Moonlight software development kit, de Icaza said. It also reuses Microsoft's open-source Silverlight controls, called Microsoft MS-PL Controls, which give developers a short cut to create buttons, checkboxes, calendars, containers and even a full database-bound datagrid in Moonlight applications on Linux.

The Moonlight 2.0 release also supports a variety of programming languages such as IronRuby and IronPython, open-source implementations of Ruby and Python that Microsoft has created and which can be used in Silverlight, as well as Visual Basic or PHP.

Another feature Moonlight 2.0 includes is the Visual Basic Runtime, which Silverlight ships with, de Icaza said. The runtime in Moonlight is a tuned-up version of a VB runtime created by ISV Mainsoft a few years ago, he added.

De Icaza also outlined Moonlight 2.0's support of Adaptive Streaming, a feature in Silverlight that allows developers to create their own transports to fetch media, which does not limit them to using the HTTP.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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