Opera Inbound and Shooting for the Moonlight -- Visual Studio Magazine

Desmond File

Opera Inbound and Shooting for the Moonlight

Impressed as I am by the Silverlight story Microsoft is telling, I've been disappointed by two things. One has been the lack of support for the excellent Opera Web browser. Well, it seems Microsoft has addressed that blind spot. Check out the Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Developer Reference graphic here.

Looks like Opera users can look forward to running Silverlight apps and content. You can read more about this in Chris Kanaracus' report.

The other issue is lack of Linux support. Microsoft's response to pointed questions on Silverlight supporting Linux has been consistent: "We listen to our customers and if our customers say they want Linux support..."

That's code for "Don't hold your breath."

Or maybe you can. Because Miguel de Icaza, the man behind the open source Mono project for running .NET apps on Linux, plans to produce a Linux version of Silverlight by the end of 2007.

Known for the time being as "Moonlight," the effort will build atop the existing Mono infrastructure, adding the components needed to make Silverlight apps and content playable on Moonlight-enabled systems.

What do you think? Is Microsoft hurting itself by passing on Linux and leaving the platform to Adobe? Let me know your thoughts on this and de Icaza's efforts at [email protected].

Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/09/2007

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.
Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.
As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.
Useful New-ish Features in .NET/C#

We often hear about the big new features in .NET or C#, but what about all of those lesser known, but useful new features? How exactly do you use constructs like collection indices and ranges, date features, and pattern matching?
TypeScript 5.8 Beta Speeds Program Loads, Updates

"TypeScript 5.8 introduces a number of optimizations that can both improve the time to build up a program, and also to update a program based on a file change in either --watch mode or editor scenarios."