Microsoft’s Silverlight Gunning For Flash
Microsoft has unveiled a number of new details about Silverlight the company’s new Flash competitor. In series of announcements at the ongoing Mix 07 conference, Microsoft revealed that portions of the new development platform would be open source.
Specifically, the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) component of Silverlight will be released under an open source license. The DLR allows developers to write in dynamic languages like Ruby or Python but then compiles them into .NET code.
The open source announcement seems to be aimed at drawing in outside developers and given that Adobe recently release large portions of Flash as open source projects, Microsoft’s move seems almost inevitable.
At the same time the DLR aspects of .NET has been around for a while and so far it hasn’t drawn in many outsiders. As such the announcement feels more like a PR move to combat Adobe’s announcement, than a real directional shift.
Other highlights from the Silverlight announcements at Mix include news that Silverlight include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) meaning a subset of the .NET framework is now cross-platform and can run in the browser.
By all accounts Silverlight is fast, very fast. Some of the better coverage, for those wanting to know more details, can be found at TechCrunch and ZDNet.
The CLR aspect of Silverlight is big news, for the first time .NET apps will have cross-platform support and in bringing .NET to the browser (almost all browsers) Microsoft has significantly changed its IE-only strategy.
Unfortunately for Silverlight Adobe is way ahead in this territory. Flash is nearly ubiquitous on the web and Silverlight is going to have some serious catching up to do.
