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Novell Releases Silverlight for Linux Source Code
Silverlight tooling may be absent from the Visual Studio 2008
service pack beta, but cross-platform developers can now download the source code for Moonlight, the open source project chartered with building a Silverlight runtime for Linux.
Miguel de Icaza and his Mono team at Novell released the first public source code for interested developers and contributors last week, but cautioned that the app is not near beta or feature complete. Developers need to build audio and video codecs from source code, for example.
Built on Novell's open source .NET platform called Mono, Moonlight 1.0, when it is released, will support most Linux distributions, according to de Icaza, along with FireFox 2 and 3, Konqueror and Opera browsers.
The first release will also support the JavaScript programming model found in Silverlight 1.0 and the Mono team plans to support the .NET programming model for rich Internet apps found in Silverlight 2, which is currently in beta 1 phase.
Moonlight was announced in tandem with the Silverlight 1.0, released last September. The technology is the result of what de Icaza terms an "informal partnership" with Microsoft. The Mono team has had access to Silverlight test suites and specifications. Microsoft said it also plans to post the media codecs for open source users.
About the Author
Kathleen Richards is the editor of RedDevNews.com and executive editor of Visual Studio Magazine.