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Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Microsoft Silverlight

Today, Microsoft announced the first public versions of its Silverlight application for creating and experiencing rich, interactive applications online. There are two different versions of the cross-browser plug-in: Silverlight 1.0 beta (download for Windows or Mac) and Silverlight 1.1 alpha (download for Windows or Mac).

The big difference between 1.0 beta and 1.1 alpha versions is that the 1.1 alpha allows developers to create Silverlight applications using .NET technologies such as C#. If you don't care much about that new advancement, you probably won't be too excited about some of the sample Silverlight applications that have been created.

To be fair, the downloads of the client only went public today, but the Silverlight gallery of applications is quite slim--eight for the 1.0 beta and seven for the 1.1 alpha, several of which are identical. The two that jumped out at me were the Grand Piano (for 1.0 beta) and Chess (for 1.1 alpha) applications. Grand Piano lets you play a full octave of a virtual piano via keyboard or mouse, and Chess provides a gaming environment with pluggable AI and two gameplay algorithms in both C# and JavaScript.

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