Microsoft Launches Silverlight Platform - Adobe Flash Killer

Microsoft hopes to push Adobe Flash out of the market. The new Microsoft Silverlight technology (formerly codenamed Windows Presentatoin Foundation Everywhere (WPF / E) ) will provide video transmission as well as interactive functionality directly from the website. From the very beginning, the plugin works under Firefox and Safari, that is, Microsoft is ready for anything to make the technology a global standard. Forest Key, director of product management for Microsoft Server and Tools, spoke

about the news today at the National Broadcasters Association Conference in Las Vegas . The technology is based on the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) graphics engine .

Microsoft has already enlisted the support of content publishers and partners. Among them are Akamai Technologies, Brightcove, Eyeblaster, Major League Baseball and Netflix.

For the wide distribution of the new platform, Microsoft needs support from three sides. In addition to content publishers, this is also a wide mass of users (this will not be a problem if you include Silverlight in the mandatory update of IE) and developers who must create new interactive applications based on Silverlight.

In the future, other key Microsoft products will be optimized for Silverlight, including the IIS7 Media Pack plug-in for Internet broadcasting, which is planned for Windows Server. Another key component will be Microsoft Expression development tools (due in June) for creating interactive Internet applications - this is an alternative to the recently introduced Adobe Creative Suite 3.

According to experts, the new Microsoft platform will be difficult to achieve the level of popularity of Adobe Flash, but users of a single web Microsoft’s infrastructures may begin migrating to Silverlight and Expression pretty soon.

Work on Silverlight technology has been going on for over two years. The beta version of the plugin is scheduled to be released on April 30, the size of the distribution package will not exceed 2 MB.

Adobe also does not sleep in a hat and has already announced the release of a universal offline player Adobe Media Player.

via Infoworld