Update: Listen to our podcast interview with Silverlight product manager Brian Goldfarb at TalkCrunch.
Today at Mix07 Microsoft made a number of major announcements, mostly around the recently-released Silverlight (formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere). Microsoft presented both new products and a new vision for how services and software will interoperate in the Microsoft and Silverlight ecosystems. Microsoft is providing not only the tools and software but they are complementing it with new services from their Live division. Microsoft have also demonstrated today that their vision is for all browsers and all web users, not just users of Internet Explorer, as a common theme during the keynote presentations was inter-operability with both Firefox and Safari, and working with the Mac OSX platform.
During the keynote the new Expression Studio applications were demonstrated to great effect. These are applications targeted at designers rather than the traditional Microsoft developer crowd, and Microsoft seems to have done a good job of providing a great suite of applications that designers can use to build powerfull web applications on Silverlight. Today also marks the official gold release of Expression Studio.
When Silverlight was first announced two weeks ago, it was all about a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web - in short, a competitor to Flash. Today, only 14 days from the original announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that Silverlight will also contain a compact CLR, allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages.
The CLR
The biggest part of the announcement today is that Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. What this means is that a subset of the full .NET platform that runs on desktops can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, with Silverlight you can code in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it.
The most remarkable part of the CLR are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in at around 4MB - which with current broadband penetration is effortless. Second of all the CLR is fast, very very fast. In a demonstration today showing a game of chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude. Developers can simple take their existing Javascript and copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment. Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.
Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it - it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.
Multimedia
A lot of the demonstrations of Silverlight technology have dealt with multimedia - particularly online video, and Silverlight has a very strong hand in this area. Online video has traditionally been associated with Flash, and most users are familiar with the constraints that such video has such as quality levels and fullscreen viewing. Using Silverlight you can distribute multimedia as part of the application at quality levels up to 720p (high definition) and also in native full screen (not just a maximized browser screen). The demonstrations shown today were simply gorgeous, and we are finally seeing a web-based video distribution model that can compete with both desktop-based downloads as well as DVD and other offline content.
As with all Silverlight applications, video can be streamed down through IE, Firefox or Safari on both Windows and Mac OSX. If an application is doing just video and audio and doesn’t require the rest of the Silverlight CLR functionality, then the total download including the codecs required to play the stream will be around 2MB (it will be a bit bigger for Mac OSX as it is a universal binary). The install happens automatically, and doesn’t require a restart in IE which will probably result in video content sites being the first major distributors of the Silverlight 1.0 client across browsers. I expect that over time we will see a host of sites, especially those currently serving WMV of other formats into media player embeds, migrate their video serving to Silverlight.
Services
The same video sites that will be switching to Silverlight for content delivery will also want to consider one of the new web services announced by Microsoft today. The service is called Silverlight Streaming and it allows users and developers to host their Silverlight content and apps with Microsoft, taking advantage of their extensive global network of datacenters and their content delivery network. Best of all, this service is free, and while currently it is only in alpha it allows users to upload up to 4GB of content, and to stream up to 1 million minutes of online video delivery at 700kbps, around DVD quality. Starting right now, you can build a total video content site using Silverlight at no cost. The future for this service looks good as they will incorporate Silverlight Streaming with the MSN Video ad network to allow you to easily monetize your video streams and participate in a revenue sharing opportunity with Microsoft while removing your distribution costs. There will also be a premium level of content delivery where you will be able to pay for higher levels of usage - the cost for this service is as yet unknown but expect it to be very low.
Mobile
Silverlight was demonstrated today on a Windows mobile device as part of a new service that the NBL have built. The demo showed both Silverlight applications and media streaming running on a mobile phone - so Silverlight even at this stage is about more than just the desktop browser and desktop market. With windows mobile and Symbian now the two dominant mobile platforms, I can’t see any reasons why we won’t see Silverlight on Symbian as well - thus spreading the platform across the vast majority of both desktops and mobiles, something that alternative platforms have not managed to do.
What is next..
In all we should expect to see more services provided by Microsoft as part of the ecosystem. Ray Ozzie today spoke about a vision of services complimenting software - and announcing Silverlight Streaming at the same time as the new Silverlight client is an excellent example of that. Microsoft are clearly determined to position themselves as the premier provider of tools, software and services for the web.
Silverlight is excellent technology and those asking why developers and application providers won’t just stick to flash only need to look at XAML, the runtime speed and size and the flexible options with programming languages combined with very strong multimedia support to start to see the answer. Microsoft have a battle on their hands to convince the developer and designer communities that their platform is the best platform, but most of this convincing won’t be a technical showdown but rather the establishment of trust between users and Microsoft as the vendor of this new platform. That being said, Microsoft do have the largest developer community and the excitement from that community at the conference here today was very evident - so the question won’t be if there will be a killer Silverlight app but rather when, as Microsoft have given not just traditional Microsoft .NET developers but also many others a new playground in which to build very cool new apps.
My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight. There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers and it is up against Flash which is deeply entrenched - but the barrier to delivering a new plugin to browsers is nowhere near as high as most users will trust Microsoft as the publisher of the plugin and will install it. I also expect that Silverlight will get distribution through Windows Update and Microsoft’s own applications (hotmail?).
To find out more about Silverlight, and to download toolkits and samples and particpiate in discussions check out the new Silverlight website at www.silverlight.net. Silverlight 1.0 will go gold sometime this summer.
Nik Cubrilovic has been a contributor to Techcrunch since early 2006. He writes a blog at www.nik.com.au and he is the CEO of Omnidrive
Finally a decent explanation of Silverlight - thank you.
I agree, quite a good explanation of this Silverlight business!
I like how every mention of cross-platform means only Windows and OSX. Let’s call a spade a spade: Microsoft has little interest in supporting anything other than their own platform, and only supports OSX to avoid the Mac fanboy rhetoric that would result if OSX wasn’t supported.
I eagerly await having to use a proprietary operating system to visit culturally influenced and influencing websites, video/multimedia sharing being the current poster child, because they are implemented using increasingly closed technology.
I had my doubts about this challenger to Flash until presented in the context of streaming media. Now, I can see this is yet another good move by MSFT in the internet television landgrab, and SilverLight’s value to the xBox / MediaCenter / WindowsMobile platform shouldn’t be underestimated, even if it doesn’t sway Flash-aholics from their tool of choice. Will be interesting to see how Adobe’s streaming suite will compete with this.
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next year.
Will it be as cross-platform as IE?
I do remember that IE was marketed as cross-platform when it still had a competitor: IE4 for Windows (all), Mac OS & Solaris, IE5 for Windows (all) & Mac OS, IE6 for Windows (all) and finally IE7 for Windows (XP & Vista only).
Been there, seen that.
Not for me anymore, thanks.
By the way, Nik, a mainly closed-source implementation of secrets APIs available only on 2 proprietary platforms can surely be a nice toy to play with but I would not call that a “vision for all web users”. Or am I not a web user?
Great article. As an MS developer, getting a Flash replacement could not come soon enough.
This is extremely exciting news. I have been watching Microsoft’s developments in this arena. I considered several times getting into Flash, but this makes life so much easier. Now I don’t have to learn entirely new technologies - I can stick with .NET.
Are all of the above commenters on the TechCrunch gravy train? This reads as a Miscrosoft “Advertorial” if I’ve ever seen one. Don’t spend it all in one place Michael.
I used to be a Microsoft-only developer.
As much as this sounds like a troll, I’m simply tired of hearing about their reactionary efforts to follow trends. I saw Zune’s demise from a mile away, and I’m wondering how long it’ll take for this to tank as well.
MS has created a very successful market of developers who are willing to throw money at their problems - i.e. component development/activex , turning Visual Studio into .NET (and causing all their VB coders to run to the bookstores), etc.
What happened to Vista being impenetrable to virii and whatever soup-du-jour attacks were supposed to be on the horizon? Do we just not talk about the known exploits, or do we pretend they just never issued that press release.
I’m still a Windows kid (2000, thanks very much - I don’t need to drop another 400 dollars so I can have rounded buttons and groovy graphics), but I’m only here for the same reason as most developers - I’m admittedly too far gone to bother re-investing months to move to another platform (and lose all my windows-only software licenses for the tools I use).
Once IE7 became a pretty blatant feature lift from Opera and Firefox, I’d had enough. How long until other people do as well?
Good … at last a tuf competition for the flash market has come .
It’ll be interesting to see how many sites and users end up adopting the technology. It used to be impossible to get people to download a new plugin just so they could view your site, but I guess thats how flash got started too…
I think the OSX support was a good move provided they can keep it up to date with the Windows version. To all the people complaining about Linux support… get real! Mac users already represent such a small fraction of consumer web users, how important is it that MSFT go through the trouble of developing a plugin for the 5 nerds that user Linux as their day to day OS for browsing the web?
Nice explanation finally. I doubt silverlight will ever reach the adoption rate that flash has seen. Maybe it could just drive Flash to innovate more.
Wow, something Microsoft finally seems to have gotten right and is competing in the…highly?…competitive Flash market? Seriously, it’s a good explanation and all but how does this help Microsoft compete against Google in either online advertising or search? Nothing was mentioned about either. While a seemingly solid product, it reeks of lack of direction.
It looks like Google is finally doing some good: they’ve spurred MS back into being the research-based, pioneering company it used to be before monopoly-hood.
MS will make Adobe another Sun Microsystems by today’s announcements. Just look at the possibilities by all tools combined…huge huge huge step towards staying as a leader. Mikey, next time, show some enthusiam when you are really excited..don’t be just hypocrate and let others write this special blog entry when you really feel you should write it…
I completely agree with David Mackey.
This is exiting news for all the .NET developers! Of course nobody expects them to overthrow Flash overnight but this is a very smart move by MSFT.
# 15 Agree with you 100%
How is this better than flash? For any product to gain ground, it has to have a real advantage over competitors. Is there any chance this could become the security nightmare of ActiveX?
Flash gained ground because there was no other good alternatives to present animation in a browser at the time, not the case anymore for silverlight.
With the growing popularity of and adoption of Linux in countries like India, where there will be massive growth in broadband Internet usage over the next 5-10 years, MS may be forced to port this platform in order to remain relevant in those markets. Either way, it sounds interesting.
Development of a plug-in for Opera on linux is being discussed by Microsoft. There is a silverlight demo on the main developer’s blog that includes a video of the blogger discussing this.
http://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh/
I looked at the tutorials and stuff on how to actually use it as a programmer. The Javascript+XAML stuff is falling-over-easy. I can see how half competent programmers can create really cool stuff with this, and no expensive development environment like Adobe’s software needed. Pretty good. Now with SilverLight Streaming they just removed the last barrier to entry, they’ll even host the application for you. Cool.
One downside: I installed SilverStream and it needed a reboot. Until they solve that its a non-starter for the average Joe User, unless they sneak it in with some Windows Update, which require reboots sometimes. But how many people got the Windows Update turned on? Getting wide distribution is going to be somewhat of a problem.
It’s about time someone gave a good explanation… good luck trying to figure it out on microsofts website.
First Silverlight worm/virus/spyware in 3…2…1….
It sounds interesting, but forget for a moment how cool it might be technologically. How is this an offensive move rather than a defensive one? What prompts money to change hands? Other than stifling competitors, why is Microsoft doing this?
Why isn’t Adobe’s Flex mentioned in this article nor comments? It looks like Microsoft’s Silverlight is just a copy of Flex. As a framework for Flash it gives devellopers a powerfull tool for creating Rich Internet Applications thruw the means of Actionscript and MXML (the flex markup language). It contains all the functionality of Flash in a structural way, which clears the way for rapid development. With the new Creative Suite (3) there’s also a thigter integration between the former Macromedia tools and the Adobe tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. As Adobe is also moving forward and there products are already commonly used by designers aswell as devellopers, Microsoft has to bridge a giant gap to win some market share. As the giant they are, they are probally capible of bridging the gap, though it will be a tough battle.
(I appologise for my bad English)
for .net web dev shops who don’t have flash expertise and out source it this is a winner.
All MS has to do is get large broadcasters to port their media players over to it and the rollout will explode.
They will roll it out to all windows users at some point I am guessing.
I agree with #27 but would also give a shout out for Apollo, Adobe’s new internet platform.
One of Microsoft’s big problems, as mentioned in the article is credibility with the right marketplace - something that Adobe has in spades.
I was thinking about Apollo too. This article talks of Silverlight bringing the desktop to the web as it were, whereas Apollo is about bringing the web to the desktop (or opening up the desktop to web apps). Are they basically about the same thing? As someone who plays around with some websites and would like to be able to develop web apps that work offline, what do people think is the best route to go down (ie learn something once)?
Thx
Thank god for a extremely detailed explanation of Silverlight that too on Techcrunch the irony. Now can we stop comparing this with flex, apollo etc. As far as I can see Silverlight beats the pants out of them all.
“… chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude.”
Holy! That must be the most surprising thing ever, compiled bytecode wins against a scripting language!
That’s great news! Agree with #15 totally - Google is upto something good now.
Good explanation of Silverlight, however I expect to see a Firefox extension pretty soon to block all Silverlight while viewing web pages.
Maybe it will be called, SilverBlock.
I know a dog when I see one.
Lol. This would piss off Firefox, Opera browser. Hahahaha. IT wouldn’t work on Firefox and Opera. It won’t get HTML & Javascript right.
I’ll bet the script kiddies and the botnet gurus are drooling all over themselves with this announcement-like Simon said- first Silverlight worm/virus/spyware in 3…2…1…. -This is really going to be fun. I’ll keep Silverlight off my ‘puter thanks. And I’ll bet that’s the story with business users as well. It’s been hard enough to get them to install any other plug-ins on their machines. I can’t wait to hear the backlash when they do a “security” update that opens their users to Silverlight control. But really- nothing to see here- move along.
wow, in the us you have real ms fans. you are all freak out about what? ms is copying a software again? wow, impressiv. even the name is a joke. a silverlight and a flash is pretty much the same, isn’t they?
Hi, It’s me again…
I tell you why Apollo and Silverlight will fail to reach the market.
most users don’t have high speed modem. I’m dead serious. Everyone is keeping budget small. Here’s why?
Some 70% small businesses and users don’t live rich town like redmond or silicon valley. Some state only have 56k modem (Not business DSL). People can’t afford to buy newly operating system and high speed connection. Why don’t you(Apollo developers & Silverlight) MBAs and super geniuses travel down to Datriot, New Orleans, Maine, LA, lowerclass in nj, and poor states.
1.) milk is expensive
2.) food is expensive
3.) gas is expensive
4.) rent is expensive
5.) mortage is expensive
6.) high technology on poor states can’t generate revenues.
7.) You got teens going to war with iraq
8.) college is expensive
9.) product is expensive; Product is cheap in overseas
10.) Stockmarket turmoil might hit on VC technologies.
Sorry guys, everything else in here isn’t love.
This is why Apollo and Silverlight started to failed soon. You guys need marketing research. Keeping budget too high is going to make next stockmarket crash.
it’s funny how they dont require validation for the silverlight install — are they saying they need “pirate penetration” to get some silverlight some traction??
The sad part of this movie is …
“Flash has such in routes’ if Adobe would have just made it near open source, and developed some tools to easily use it… This product wouldn’t have had a shot - now it does.
The Silverlight logo look like a pair of underpants!
@whoever is complaining about ActiveX…. Are F*ing serious? This is a Web 2.0 Blog!!!!
Microsoft first implemented the XMLHttpRequest object in Internet Explorer 5 for Windows as an ActiveX object. Engineers on the Mozilla project implemented a compatible native version for Mozilla 1.0 (and Netscape 7). Apple has done the same starting with Safari 1.2.
http://developer.apple.com/int.....tpreq.html
Jeez
@39
According to eMarketer, using the FCC as its benchmark for broadband households for 2007, Based on 288.5 million people n the U.S. ages 3-plus in 2007:
36% (103.5 million) of Americans are Not Online
15.7% (45.2 million) of Americans are Dial up users
48.3% (139.4 million) of Americans are Broadband users.
I would say that 139.4 million people is enough to kickstart a cool technology.
Very disappointing that there was no mention of supporting anything other than OS X. Microsoft’s mentality hasn’t changed. This is an exclusive move…not an inclusive one. Linux on the desktop is far from ready for the mainstream…but why not create a true cross platform solution?
Linux on the desktop is much more of a threat to Microsoft than OS X. It’s free. Once it’s ready for general adoption then MS (and Apple) will realize a huge threat. It just smells like Microsoft is making a blatant attempt to exclude users. They’re trying to launch the browser war all over again … but this time i guess it’s a plugin/platform war :).
Silverlight isn’t a Flash copy - it’s much, much better. It’s faster, allows for smoother, better looking animations, much better video quality, and is much easier to develop for, especially since a developer can write for it using their preferred method (Javascript or .NET - which means C#, VB, Python, Ruby or Jscript).
Have you become a Microsoft stooge now too?
I agree with #45
Now that the industry is headed to web service applications instead of desktop installed software, how could Microsoft try to keep Linux from going main stream? They can try to make the web proprietary only. This is the story here and I was really disappointed that this infomercial of an article didn’t even hint around about it.
They aren’t as worried about OSX because it is only available with newly purchased Mac hardware. However, every computer that now runs Windows could run Linux tomorrow at no cost if people decided to switch.
I am sure it’s a great technology and a great advance but if they leave the millions of linux users behind they will find out it’s more than just 5 nerds despite what #12 thinks.
3 things give me comfort about this story.
- Open Source will find a way to make this work
- Adobe Flex will grow faster after it’s Open
- There might be a possible Linux version thanks to the Novell/MS deal (not very likely)
I was lucky to get a demo of this a few weeks ago and like what I see.
One of the things that, working in a MSFT development shop and having a true love/hate disgust/appreciation of them and their methods, and agreeing that in general they tend to be more reactionary than creative, MSFT got right and others are only starting now to catch on (BEA, Apple, & a couple of others, but Sun, Jboss, Borland, others did not) is that MSFT made it EASY for any developer to develop. They supported them, they give a one license fee (MSDN license I would argue was one of the most strategic business decisions they ever made. All the tools a developer could possibly need for $3000). Try doing that in Delphi, or Java. Need to buy this license and that license and it all adds up. One license, every tool imaginable. Is there any wonder there are over 60M VB - .NET developers in the world and less than 6M delphi developers and rapidly declining? Remember that Borland was bigger than MSFT at one point. (those #’s were accurate a few years ago, not sure now but still).
MSFT is a massive, massive organization. This is one of their biggest problems, they aren’t exactly nimble, they are often bogged down in meetings and silos not communicating with each other what they’re doing.
One of the problems in developing in flash is the cost. It’s not a huge issue but it’s still there and Silverlight is a lighter tool with easy integration, which is easier, and developers love easier. The huge windows development pool will like this and we’ve been waiting for it. And that’s not a small thing.
The logo does kind of look like a set of futuristic Depends though…..
If even half of Silverlight features are as good as described here, and it will be cheaper than Adobe Flash, that may feed web growth for years to come.