At the special event, called as “See the Light”, which was held at the Intercontinental, SF, Microsoft made the official announcement of Siliverlight 3. Silverlight 3 is the latest successor of the Silverlight series, which is quite well known for being a tough competitor to Adobe’s Flash Interactive Player. This plugin, allows the websites to display video and various other user-interactive application-like features. The plugin itself was allowed to be download Thursday night itself, allowing users to download it and install on the IE browsers.

Microsoft introduced Silverlight as a plugin, which did it all. From rich internet applications to seamless media, it’s all supported. The new version also allows out-of-the-browser experiences for Silverlight specific applications, including various rare scenarios where no internet is present. Along with that, Silverlight now support for IIS to stream True HD 1080p video, via Microsoft’s IIS web server application. If that wasn’t enough, to completely curb Flash, Silverlight now makes full utilization of 3D hardware acceleration as well.

To make complete use of this brand new plugin, Microsoft also released a development tool, the Microsoft Expression 3. This tool will complement the Silverlight, by allowing the designer to design rich web applications making complete utilization of the Silverlight plugin and available resources. The aforementioned plugin and developlement software both, are awvailable for download from the Microsoft website,
www.microsoft.com/silverlight
www.microsoft.com/expression

Will Silverlight’s latest version be an answer for Adobe’s Flash? Or will it be yet another flop like the Bing search engine? Leave your thoughts here.

For TechMirage
Pranav Shirodkar