So today we announced Silverlight 2 Beta 2. There are a lot of features that are noteworthy but the most exciting thing is that this release is the first release of Silverlight 2 that has a go-live license. When this release is available later this week, you’ll finally be able to create and commercially deploy Silverlight 2 applications.

Another thing great about the keynote at TechEd today was the repetition of our vision for developers: Learn Once, Apply Anywhere. These four words are the way that I simply express where we’re going with our platform and tools. As a developer or a business, you want to make a bet on one thing and have that bet pay off everywhere that you or your business need to go. With Microsoft, you can learn one set of tools and platforms to target everything from your servers to your clients whether they’re browser based, desktop, or mobile. This is something that no one else can offer you.

So on to the details of the fun stuff that’s brand new in Beta 2:

· UI Framework: Beta 2 includes improvements in animation support, error handling and reporting, automation and accessibility support, keyboard input support, and general performance.  This release also provides more compatibility between Silverlight and WPF.

· Rich Controls: Beta 2 includes a new templating model called Visual State Manager that allows for easier templating for controls. Other features include the introduction of TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort, performance increases and more.  Most controls are now in the runtime instead of packaged with the application.

· Networking Support: Beta 2 includes improved Cross Domain support and security enhancements, upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications (“push” from server to Silverlight client).

· Rich Base Class Library: Beta 2 includes improved threading abilities, LINQ-to-JSON, ADO.NET Data Services support, better support for SOAP, and various other improvements to make networking and data handling easier.

· Deep Zoom: Beta 2 introduces a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles, as well as a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom. Better, event driven notification for zoom/pan state is another improvement in Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

So, I don’t normally blog about competitors but I’m quoted in the New York Times today and they promoted me to executive and dubbed me the father of Flash, or somesuch. Ah, here it is:

Finally, there is Microsoft. It is pushing its competitor to Flash, called Silverlight. Three years ago, Microsoft hired one of Mr. Lynch’s crucial software developers at Macromedia, Brad Becker, to help create it. Mr. Becker was a leading designer of the Flash programming language.

Sweet, I was crucial. Then it got picked up on Slashdot:

The article has quotes from the developer behind Microsoft’s Silverlight (he was a colleague at Macromedia of Adobe’s Air guy)…

Now I’m THE developer behind Silverlight. Nice! To set the record straight, I was officially the product designer for Flash, Flex Builder, and what became known as Flex. And although I’ve had a surprising amount of face time with executives here at Microsoft (including a very interesting hour long chat w/ Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie) I am not an executive myself. Nor am I a developer anymore, let alone THE Developer. I’m a group product manager. But enough about me…

The NYT article continues by saying there’s a million Flash developers which is completely crazy unless every single box of Flash ever sold was to a professional developer and they’re all still using it. Essentially they’re including hobbyists when comparing to the number of actual active pro devs. But that’s a red herring anyway since AIR is really about Flex and there are virtually no Flex developers out there. In fact, lack of developers is Flex’s second worst problem.

The article picks up a quote from me:

Microsoft executives said they thought the company would have an advantage because Silverlight has a more sophisticated security model. “Desktop integration is a mixed blessing. There is potentially a gaping security hole,” said Microsoft’s Mr. Becker. “We’ve learned at the school of hard knocks about security.”

Technically I think I said that .NET has a more sophisticated security model. Although Silverlight is a part of .NET, it’s running in the browser so it inherits the browser security sandbox and then restricts that even further to keep things legit. Microsoft has indeed learned at the school of hard knocks when it comes to security. No process is perfect but the rigor I see here around security is an order of magnitude greater than any other software shop I’ve worked at. Of course, even without that, the bar is pretty low when compared with AIR from what I understand. It appears that with AIR, an app either has full access to your file system or no access at all. I imagine that’s something they’ll have to fix in the next version. In the meantime, though, this is something really obvious to everyone. Except, possibly, the end users out there that might run untrusted apps that they find on the web. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

Most importantly though, I was so busy at work that I didn’t get a paper copy of the Times and last night everyone was sold out. How’s that for irony?

Pretty cool to see Silverlight as a “Staff Pick” from Apple!

Apple – Downloads – Mac OS X – Development Tools
Apple.com Silverlight page

A tough decision most face is whether to take full advantage of a single platform or to go lowest common denominator and address multiple platforms. One of the nice things about Microsoft .NET is that we were able to pursue both: take full advantage of a PC’s hardware with WPF and take much of that goodness cross-platform with Silverlight. And while you’re at it, designers and developers can reuse assets and XAML in both projects. In the next release of Silverlight, the .NET Common Language Runtime is part of the action so you’ll even be able to share C#, VB, etc. between WPF and Silverlight projects.

And while you’re checking out Silverlight, be sure to check out the Halo3 movies on MSN. The site is powered by Silverlight so enjoy the HD videos. And speaking from experience, the game is the best of the trilogy… 

Halo 3 on MSN

Let’s get right to the point. The rumors are true: Silverlight 1.0 has been released to the web and Microsoft is lending official support to the Linux version (named “Moonlight”) under development at Novell. We’re also releasing Expression Encoder 1.0. Good news all around and lots of fun toys for you all to play with.

Read more at the usual places: http://silverlight.net and http://microsoft.com/silverlight. Also, Scott Guthrie’s blog has a lot of details here.