Microsoft Office Standard 2007 Can (and will) Micr

As Microsoft created plain at its Expert Developers Conference last week, there;s no end in sight to the checklist of new features and features it options to add to Silverlight.Some developers who've been about the fence about no matter whether they should be developing Windows applications making use of Windows Presentation Basis (WPF) or Silverlight applications see a light in the finish with the tunnel of confusion. Microsoft is including much more and more WPF functions to Silverlight (and vice versa). But as Tim Anderson, an IT journalist/blogger noted last week,Microsoft Office Standard 2007, there's a downside to this strategy: By adding technologies like COM support to Silverlight,Buy Office 2007, Microsoft is doing harm to its story that Silverlight is really a cross-platform browser plug-in that supports Windows, Mac — and, thanks towards the Mono folks at Novell , Linux — equally.(The Register;s Gavin Clarke and I talk much more regarding the risks of making Silverlight better on Windows than other platforms during our latest episode with the Microbite podcast.)The COM object assistance that Microsoft is promising for Silverlight 4,Office Standard 2007 Key, the version of Microsoft;s Web application framework/plug-in due to ship by mid-2010,Office 2007 Professional Key, is applicable to Silverlight running on Firefox or Internet Explorer on Windows only. Neither Mac OS X nor Linux assistance COM.Microsoft officials were quick to note that including access to COM components was a customer request, not something Microsoft did in a vacuum. When I asked Microsoft about its programs to keep Silverlight in sync across platforms, a spokesperson sent me the following statements:“In Silverlight 4 we addressed over 8,000 customer feature requests. One specific request was incorporating support for accessing COM components, enabling common enterprise scenarios such as automating Microsoft Office and providing developers easy access to hardware capabilities such as scanners and security card readers.”But check this out: Microsoft officials say they are evaluating how to add some kind of COM component access to the Mac version of Silverlight. From the aforementioned spokesperson:“Unfortunately, the Mac offers no support for COM interfaces and we’re actively evaluating possibilities to get COM-like features around the Mac.”There;s no further word on when or how Microsoft ideas to add this kind of assistance to Silverlight for the Mac.Meanwhile, it looks like Novell;s Developer Platform Vice President Miguel de Icaza is itching to create assistance for the new Silverlight 4 features to future implementations of Moonlight, the Novell/Mono team-developed implementation of Silverlight for Linux. After the PDC,Office 2010 Sale, de Icaza blogged:“For the Moonlight team, this means that there is a whole lot of work ahead of us to bring every Silverlight 3 and 4 feature. I think I speak for the whole Mono team when I say that this is exciting, fascinating, challenging and feels like we just drank a huge energy boost drink.”Microsoft;s latest Silverlight moves mean that Silverlight is evolving to become a universal run-time for Microsoft;s Common Language Runtime (CLR), the heart of .Net, according to de Icaza. Developing a desktop suite of Silverlight apps isn;t just a pipe dream, de Icaza said; it;s a real, doable project.Some developers are already dreaming of the possibility of a Silverlight operating system. (For some reason, I think the Windows team might try to derail that effort before it could ever happen, but who knows?) Microsoft has more immediate and pressing concerns, though: It requires to keep Silverlight in sync across platforms if the company plans to play up the “available everywhere” piece of its Silverlight message.