HOW TO: Running SilverLight Applications on Linux and Mac

I often get asked by a number of developers on how can they run SilverLight applications on Linux and / or Mac. Hence I thought of making this no-brainer information as a post here.

For Linux:

Moonlight is an open source implementation of SilverLight, and is primarily targeted for Linux and other Unix/X11 based operating systems. The purpose of this implementation is to allow Moonlight to run any SilverLight application without having to recompile that application.

Around Sep 2007, Microsoft and Novell announced a technical collaboration that includes access to Microsoft's test suites for SilverLight and the distribution of a Media Pack for Linux users that will contain licensed media codecs for video and audio.

Moonlight 2 was released December 17, 2009 and is available for the major Linux distributions, with support for Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers.

Download the Moonlight plug-in from - https://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight.

Getting Started with Moonlight - https://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight#Getting_Started.

For Mac:

It is much simpler on Mac. Just navigate to any web site running SilverLight 3 application to automatically download the plug-in. Alternatively, you can download it here.

However, please keep in mind that SilverLight 3 works on Intel-based Mac systems, and not the PowerPC based Mac systems.

Technorati Tags: Linux,Unix,Novell,Firefox,Konqueror,Opera,Mono,Silverlight,RIA,Moonlight