Microsoft throws Silverlight 3 beta at Adobe Microsoft has opened a new front in its battle with Adobe Systems, releasing beta code for Silverlight 3 that plugs fundamental gaps in its media player and attempts to out flank Flash. The company opened its annual Mix developer and designer conference by releasing the Silverlight 3 SDK and Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 …
"...there had been 350 million installs of Silverlight since 2007..."
Largely because Silverlight appeared as either a recommended or critical update to Windows in Windows Update. So unless you were monitoring updates and applying them yourself; it would have been automatically installed as a "recommended" update.
One question though: if SL3 will allow the download of library code, what's to stop malicious code being injected into it? I've not looked at it at all, but does SL have any kind of security context? What can SL do to your machine? Is it as leaky as ActiveX or did MS actually think about security with it?
Still not interested. As a platform it has the potential to be superior, but without the development tools and community to back it up, I'm not going to be making the switch. There's tons of little widgets I use for flash all the time, from open-source physics engines to custom cameras... all sorts, just browse somewhere like flashden to see the huge amount of useful thingies floating around.
If MS somehow manages to release a better version of Flash CS4 (very possible considering all the interface flaws), I'll start paying attention. The code is important, but it isn't everything. I need dev tools!
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Trouble with Microsoft today is what they sale to you are no longer what you will get, I have lost faith in reading 'Our product will do this, will do that, more secure than ever, fastest , most user friendly', when you get it, it s totally different, if it were better or same as what they are telling you, great, but almost everything is below par.
Vista - Most user friendly, faster loading time than XP, blah blah blah, we have shifted 100+ millions of copies... result ? We have Windows 7 coming soon.
"Silverlight 3 application can detect the libraries it needs and download them when the application is played, so the developer doesn't' need to pack their application with every single library during the build phase on the off chance they'll be needed."
Silverlight 2 performs on assembly loading already. Check it out:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd483293.aspx
1. Expression Blend is a weak point here. Neither designers nor developers have easy time dealing with it. Their other Expression tools are a little bit better but still not as good as Adobe's CS.
2. I bet Mac users will hate ClearType in their Silverlight apps just like Windows users hated font rendering in Safari.
3. Linux anyone? Adobe at least started porting AIR and Flash on Linux. Moonlight 1.0 was just released and it works in Firefox only.
Finally, if Silverlight is just about 5mb what the hell they've put into .net so it swallowed half a gig of my hard drive? It's even bigger than Adobe Reader! That's ridiculous!
/Mine's Google fanboy coat with Gears logo.
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