As noted in our coverage of Ray Ozzie’s MIX keynote this morning, Microsoft has released a number of significant upgrades to its Silverlight product. Silverlight is essentially a competitor to Adobe’s Flash, in that enables developers to create interactive web apps. It’s officially described as “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET’based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.” Ryan Stewart’s definition puts it in context of Microsoft’s other dev platforms:
“You can build desktop applications with Windows Presentation Foundation, build web-only applications with ASP.NET AJAX and now the hybrid Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight.”
The enhancements announced today for Silverlight include integration with .NET and support for dynamic languages – including Python and Ruby. Microsoft also announced new tool support for building Silverlight applications, with Expression Studio and the next edition of Visual Studio, code-named “Orcas”.
Tell us what you think of the new-look Silverlight in this week’s poll, below.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)