Microsoft has released Silverlight 3.0 beta to developers just before the official start of the Mix 09 conference in Las Vegas.
Silverlight 3.0 has been eagerly awaited by a large number of developers, all hoping that the magic 3.0 release from Microsoft will bring even broader adoption of the already fairly successful platform.
A comprehensive list of all the released bits can be found here.
More info to follow…
Joe Wilcox thinks OS 3.0 will kill Mix09. But if we get Silverlight on the iPhone, maybe that helps a little?
What if all developers working on Silverlight apps (and WPF .Net apps) can suddenly target both iPhone and Windows phones? Or even just the iPhone? How’s that for a START?
Seems that the folks over at TechRadar have had some further info into Microsoft delivering Silverlight for the iPhone. Unfortunately, the actual quote:
"will look to build a version of Silverlight that will work on the iPhone, although there is concern about the royalties that Apple would charge."
does not really inspire confidence that this will happen soon.
Perhaps they should ask Miguel's team to do the work if they can't....
Microsoft - if you're listening, we're waiting!!
Let's review what we know:
"We want native 3rd party apps on the iPhone"
Now - what can we gather from this. Put aside the Microhoonanigans for a while, in which Microsoft is desperately trying to revive an online strategy and be relevant...
If they could convince Apple to allow them onto the iPhone, it seems they have a much bigger slice of a much bigger pie.
Scoble is already speculating that Google is quite happy to let Microsoft and Yahoo fight it out, as they have their eyes on the real prize - mobile apps.
Generally speaking - the market for mobile applications are still in it's infancy, but you already have a situation where most people have more than one phone - so the potential is huge.
So, can Microsoft pull this off? More importantly, is anyone in the big house even thinking that this is strategically important? You would think so - given their recent win with Sony Ericsson. If not - that's why they're making desperate bids for Flickr...
This will be a great start in effectively countering Google's Android.
Of course - only time will tell, but what if it were true....
I've been taking a look at the wonderful apps surfacing from Demo 08, and I can only say I'm impressed. I'm not even sure it's really 
All the apps appearing now seem to be RIAs - Rich Internet Applications. And while you could probably build a RIA using AJAX, and do a pretty good job of it, the REALLY cool boys use AIR or Silverlight.
If you're not familiar with these, both technologies provide a cross browser / cross platform runtime - that enables rich applications to run inside the browser. The cool thing about these runtimes are that they abstract the differences between browser implementations, so that we finally truly have a write once, run everywhere world. Remember that - Sun promised that with Java back in '97....
So, what makes these new kids so cool?
Well - for a start - we're talking rich media - video and vector graphics in a very lightweight runtime. Performance tends to be excellent. On the Silverlight side, developers have access to a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation (a fairly large subset), but without the overhead of the massive .Net runtime. This makes it an extremely compelling environment to create business applications in. Not only do you have a very rich presentation mechanism without the overhead of coding to a large number of different browsers - you can deploy these apps to any OS (Apple, Microsoft or Linux) without any additional work!
Sounds too good to be true? It might, and there are obviously some details I'm not mentioning here. However, to whet your appetites, you should have a look at:
Buzzword - a truly cool word processor,
Blist - an online database that's excellent, and
JournalSample - an demo of some Silverlight abilities
Both platforms are new, but already there's a large number of developers following each camp. As users, we get to benefit as the applications created with these tools will surely enrich the Web.
So, is this Web2.0, or is it Web+ ?
I think - as we haven't had another crash yet, we should probably stick to Web 2.0 :)
Over the next few weeks I'll focus on these in a bit more detail. Specifically, Microsoft is gearing up to the next release of Silverlight, which will be announced at Mix'08 in early March.
Keep watching.
This is indeed a remarkable product. Surf on over to 
If you're in the US you can sign up for the beta, but the rest of us will have to wait a little while longer...
A quick rant about iPlayer Microsoft
If you haven't used it (and you live in the UK), I suggest you check it out immediately here. It's a great site, easy to use, VERY quick, and I would use that over the retarded inelegant SKY+ implementation any day. The limitations of SKY+ will have to wait for a later rant.
The iPlayer streams programs / movies, so there's no download and you have pretty much instantaneous access to anything that was broadcast during the past 7 days. This means if you missed something, forgot to set SKY+ to record it, you stupid SKY+ box just plain refused to record it, you can still watch it whenever. Extremely useful and the wife and I often catch up on some things or sample new shows on weekend mornings before getting up.
The primary drawback of the system is that there doesn't seem to be a way for me to get the content to my television without hooking up a computer. That just seems dumb...
While I have Vista Ultimate running on 2 laptops which are always around, neither of these are connected to my TV. I have an Xbox360 that we use as an extender, but that cannot stream the iPlayer streams as there's no Media Center component for it. A quick look at the SDK, and you realise you couldn't even do it as a quick 'hosted' HTML component, as that wouldn't give you the speed, and trying to create a 'native' component will not allow you to stream these flash format files, as the 360 only streams wmv...
To me it looks like MS is missing a trick here. Both the BBC and ITV is making all their programs for the past 7 days / month respectively available, and if I could access it natively as streams on the 360 (no long download before you start), the 360 would instantaneously become a MUCH more compelling part of most households, as it would no longer be relegated to being a 'games only' machine. The Xbox 360 should be able to do this without acting as an extender, which would further simplify the setup in most homes.
Sure this could be implemented quite easily by some of the guys at MS, so I'm not sure what the holdup is. perhaps they're waiting for the Silverlight release? - but I don't see that replacing the current flash implementation.
Can anyone shed light on this?
