Silverlight Visual Studio.net 2008

Silverlight is a cross platform, cross browser .NET plug-in that enables designers and developers to build rich media experiences and RIAs for browsers.  The preview builds we released this week currently support Firefox, Safari and IE browsers on both the Mac and Windows.

To get a sense of the types of rich browser applications you will be able to build using Silverlight, please check out this 7 minute video of the Metaliq "Top Banana" video editor sample application:

Silverlight 1.0

We are going to ship the first release of Silverlight this summer.  It is focused on enabling rich media scenarios, and will be a ~1.2MB download.  Some of its features include:

You can develop Silverlight applications using any standard text editor (no custom tool is required).  Microsoft will also be shipping support for targeting Silverlight 1.0 applications with our Expression Studio suite of products (including rich tool support for media management and video encoding support).  You can download preview CTP builds of Expression Blend and Expression Media Encoder

To learn more about the Silverlight 1.0 feature-set, as well as how to start building experiences that target it, I highly recommend watching some of the great "How do I?" videos that have recently been posted on the

I'd also recommend watching these (free) conference sessions from the MIX conference that cover Silverlight 1.0 and media scenarios: