Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Microsoft Silverlight

Bob Muglia Clarifies Microsoft’s Position On Silverlight

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:02:02 +0000

Microsoft President of servers and tools Bob Muglia clarified Microsoft’s position on Silverlight. The PDC conference in Redmond, Washington last week in Microsoft Silverlight and about 100,000 developers watched the event. Muglia intended to emphasize three points.

Below are the three points he wanted t make:
1. Silverlight is very important and strategic to Microsoft.
2. We’re working hard on the next release of Silverlight, and it will continue to be cross-browser and cross-platform, and run on Windows and Mac.
3. Silverlight is a core application development platform for Windows, and it’s the development platform for Windows Phone.

Even though Muglia clarified his stance on Silverlight, it seems that a lot of developers are mulling what platform to build applications on. I would recommend reading the comments in Muglia’s blog post.

[Bob Muglia's blog post]

Microsoft’s Silverlight Strategy “Has Shifted”

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:31:58 +0000

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) held their Professional Developers Conference this week and Silverlight 5 was not talked about much. However Microsoft did discuss their commitment to HTML5 consistently.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” stated Microsoft President of servers and tools Bob Muglia. In terms of having Silverlight run across multiple platforms, “our strategy has shifted” he added.

Silverlight will still be developed as a cross-platform solution, “but HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” added Muglia.

[ZDNet]

Microsoft Bing Visual Search Uses Images Instead Of Text

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:09:05 +0000

Microsoft Corporation is constantly researching ways to improve search. At the TechCrunch50 event earlier today, Microsoft gave a demo of Visual Search on Bing.com. The Visual Search engine uses images instead of text. The images are arranged by categories and various other parameters.

As of right now Visual Search is just an index of photo albums tagged with certain parameters. For example when I selected the Digital Cameras category, Bing showed me a bunch of cameras that I could click on. Then I narrowed the results to between 5 and 10 megapixels and the cameras out of those parameters disappeared. Nothing really new there. I’ve seen this technology before on e-commerce websites like eBay.

I’m just going to label this announcement as a “meh” since I’ve seen it before. Image searches have longer load times than text especially in countries with slow Internet connections. The Visual Search requires Microsoft Silverlight too.

BlackBerry Web Browser Rumored To Have Flash And Silverlight Support

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:51:28 +0000

BlackBerry company Research In Motion is rumored to have full Flash and Silverlight support. Well that is just great, I just bought the iPhone. Had I known this rumor before, I would have saved my money. Flash and Silverlight support may not happen until a while from now. This probably won’t happen until a summer from now.

[via BGR]

CBS Chooses Microsoft Silverlight For Streaming March Madness

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:42:20 +0000

“This is simply about our running down the checklist and trying to address each thing the fans have said they want” stated Jason Kint, CBSSports.com SVP and General Manager. “Last year, it was foremost about eliminating registration and blackouts, which we did. And this year, it’s about improving the video experience itself as much as we can.”

CBSSports.com has decided to go with Microsoft Silverlight media player to stream March Madness basketball games on their website. About 4.8 million unique visitors tuned into March Madness on CBSSports via March Madness on Demand. This lets viewers watch the game on a first come, first serve basis. March Madness will be starting on CBSSports.com on March 15. It will be available through Windows Media Player or Silverlight.

Silverlight has been winning major content syndication sports deals. Last year, Silverlight was chosen to stream the Olympics this past summer. MLB used to run on Silverlight, but recently decided to switch to Flash. It is absolutely crucial for Silverlight to perform when it comes to March Madness as people take basketball very seriously, including myself. I’ll be a very happy guy if Michigan State wins the Final Four this year.

Microsoft Silverlight To Steam Video On Presidential Inaugural Committee Website

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:32:10 +0000

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Silverlight will be used for the Presidential Inaugural Committee website to steam President-elect Barack Obama’s and Vice President elect Joe Biden’s swearing-in event this Tuesday. Microsoft Silverlight is the software giant’s response to Adobe Flash. Flash was originally developed by Macromedia, a company that Adobe bought out several years ago.

Silverlight will also be powering the video for Obama and Biden’s “Whistle Stop Tour” today. The tour will be taking place between Philadelphia and Washington D.C. for celebrations. ISteamPlanet, a content-delivery company based in Las Vegas, Nevada is working with Microsoft on streaming the event.

Silverlight 1.0 was first launched in April 2007, but it was quite ambiguous about what the capabilities were. Silverlight 2 was released last October and it was the first time it could be seen as a Flash replacement. The Democratic National Convention Committee used Silverlight 2 to power the proceedings from the convention. This included Obama’s acceptance speech to over 80,000 in Denver.

[via PCWorld]