Introducing the New Silverlight Blog
I’d like to introduce myself and the new Silverlight blog where we will provide the latest and greatest information, commentary, and thinking for Silverlight. Here, you will get to hear from the folks who build and market the technology, find useful content, and have an open forum to provide feedback.
I’m Brian Goldfarb and am responsible for our UX Platform and Tools technologies including Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET, as well the Visual Studio and Expression tools used for building these technologies. Here we will focus on our RIA efforts with Silverlight.
Silverlight, after being on the market for about a year and a half, has made incredible progress as a platform and has enjoyed unparalleled traction in the market. As a team we are incredibly excited about the possibilities of what can be done and what has been done with the technology.
We promised to provide the over 6 million .NET developers worldwide with the most feature-rich, flexible and secure platform for deploying their rich Internet applications (RIAs). The release of Silverlight 2 – which contained a cross-browser, cross-platform subset of the .NET Framework, an advanced set of controls, and cutting-edge features such as Deep Zoom – allowed us to deliver on that promise.
As a result, we've seen unbelievable momentum within the enterprise, design agencies and among a myriad of different SI and ISV partners. Organizations such as AOL, CareerBuilder.com, CBS Sports Online, eBay, Hard Rock, MTV, Renault, Samsung Electronics, The European Commission and Yahoo! Japan are just a few of the organizations that are building cutting edge RIAs using Silverlight.
Silverlight has also been tremendously successful in the media and enterprise video segments thanks to some of our great work delivering our customers the highest quality streaming video (with Smooth Streaming), the ability to scale to unprecedented levels of user demand, industry-leading DRM and unmatched price/performance. Silverlight was used to power compelling media experiences at NBCOlympics.com, the Democratic National Convention, Netflix, Blockbuster, and most recently, the live coverage of the inauguration of President Obama on the official Presidential Inauguration Committee (PIC) Website.
Silverlight 3 will continue this momentum, and bring even more innovation to market. At IAB, we announced that Silverlight 3 will include support for H.264. And at PDC, we announced that Silverlight 3 will contain support for 3D graphics, GPU hardware accelerated effects, improved data-binding support, and more. Stay tuned for several other cool features that we have planned for Silverlight 3, many of which will make their debut this week at Mix.
Because innovation is happening daily and customer momentum is just as fast, we thought it would be helpful to launch a blog where we can provide our customers and partners with more details about specific Silverlight features, news and success stories.
Brian Goldfarb