Microsoft Unleashes Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate

Tim Sneath, a Client Platform Technical Evangelist wrote a blog post yesterday about how the Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 plug-in is now available. Essentially, Silverlight 1.0 is competition for Adobe Flash, a technology that was popularized by YouTube.

Silverlight 1.0 aims to provide consistent web experiences between Windows and Mac-based computers. The plug-in also utilizes AJAX applications and has won several awards. Some of the awards include the DV Best of Show Winner provided by NewBay Media LLC and received the CNET Webware Top 100 2007 award for the Publishing category.

Since the Beta release of Silverlight 1.0, Microsoft fixed roughly 2000 bugs and integrated a JavaScript API into the plug-in. “Our stress test runs show improvements of two or three orders of magnitude in many cases, and the product demonstrates the polish one might expect from a near-final release^[1],” wrote Sneath.

Microsoft and CBS made an agreement for the use of Silverlight for a user-generated content initiative last April. And earlier this month, iStreamPlanet announced that they would be using Silverlight for their webcasting services.

The Silverlight download page is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/news-pr.aspx

[1] Tim Sneath: Silverlight 1.0 RC1 is here!

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