As Microsoft created plain at its Expert Developers Conference final week, there;s no end in sight to the checklist of new features and performance it strategies to add to Silverlight.Some developers who have been around the fence about whether they needs to be creating Windows applications making use of Windows Presentation Basis (WPF) or Silverlight applications see a light at the end of the tunnel of confusion. Microsoft is including far more and extra WPF functions to Silverlight (and vice versa). But as Tim Anderson, an IT journalist/blogger mentioned last week, there's a downside to this technique: By including technologies like COM support to Silverlight, Microsoft is doing damage to its tale that Silverlight is really a cross-platform browser plug-in that supports Windows, Mac — and, thanks to the Mono folks at Novell , Linux — equally.(The Register;s Gavin Clarke and I talk more regarding the risks of generating Silverlight better on Windows than other platforms during our latest episode of the Microbite podcast.)The COM object support that Microsoft is promising for Silverlight 4, the version of Microsoft;s Web application framework/plug-in due to ship by mid-2010, 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 incorporating access to COM components was a customer request, not something Microsoft did in a vacuum. When I asked Microsoft about its strategies to keep Silverlight in sync across platforms,
Office 2010 Key, a spokesperson sent me the following statements:“In Silverlight 4 we addressed over 8,
Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise,000 customer feature requests. One specific request was including assistance 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,
Microsoft Office 2007 Product Key, the Mac offers no support for COM interfaces and we’re actively evaluating alternatives to get COM-like features on the Mac.”There;s no further word on when or how Microsoft options to add this kind of support to Silverlight for the Mac.Meanwhile, it looks like Novell;s Developer Platform Vice President Miguel de Icaza is itching to create support for the new Silverlight 4 performance to future implementations of Moonlight, the Novell/Mono team-developed implementation of Silverlight for Linux. After the PDC, de Icaza blogged:“For the Moonlight team, this means that there's a good deal 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,
Microsoft Office 2007 Key, de Icaza said; it;s a real, doable project.Some developers are already dreaming with 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 extra immediate and pressing concerns,
Office Enterprise 2007, though: It requires to keep Silverlight in sync across platforms if the company options to play up the “available everywhere” piece of its Silverlight message.