Hello again!

Tomorrow is supposedly a big day for Silverlight 2.0 at Microsoft Mix conference.

For those that don’t know.  Silverlight 1.1 and 2.0 are the same thing.

Silverlight 1.0 (a browser plug-in) was released last year – it uses a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation in the XAML format and can be scripted with JavaScript.  You can do lovely animated vector graphics, images and streamed video.  It is cross-browser and cross-platfrom.

Silverlight 2.0 has been in alpha for a long time and it has been very quiet except for a few recent posts by Scott Guthrie recently (the man in charge of it at Microsoft).  It has a mini subset of .net 3.5 in it, plus some other classes for talking to the browser.  There’s also control/layout support for complex controls.  It also should be cross-browser and cross-platform – you can use your Windows dev machine to remote debug silverlight running in Safari on a Mac!  It may also include the Dynamic Runtime (DLR) – think immediately compiled and run code – like a command prompt, but much cooler.  See the full details.

Silverlight 1.0 is like a web presentation competitor to Flash.  2.0 is like a web-application development platform.  The implications of bring the whole .NET development community to bear (without having to worry about HTML or Javascript anymore!) is HUGE!.

The rumour would be that Beta 1 will be released at Mix, and a Beta 2 has been talked about.

The big 3 questions for me are:

• When will it RTM?
• When will the mobile version (demo’d as WPF/E 2 years ago!)
• When will video capture be put in (and on mobile!)?

Oh… and when will Microsoft manage to catch up with its development tools for all these new technologies.

Check out the mix website for the live keynote at 09:30 PT tomorrow (March 5 2008).