Why Can't I "Go Live" with Silverlight 1.1 Alpha?

I just wanted to clarify something that is hopefully already pretty well understood. As folk know, we released an alpha of Silverlight 1.1 at MIX, and there are lots of people who would love to use it even in its current form. It's great to see the excitement around using .NET for web development, of course, but Silverlight 1.1 (now known as 2.0) is not ready for "Go Live" usage at this stage, and the EULA explicitly prohibits deployment in production sites.

Why is this? Primarily it's because the currently-available 1.1 bits were produced very early in the development milestone, and they are not being actively serviced. If you have Silverlight 1.1 on your machine, the latest version you are likely to have is 1.1.20926.0 (where the last four digits of the build number indicate that this build was compiled on 09/26, i.e. September 26th). We actually shipped a maintenance release a couple of weeks ago for 1.0 (build 1.0.21115.0), but we're not attempting to keep the 1.1 alpha build in sync with this. (Hey, it's a developer preview build!)

The net impact of that is that if you have the 1.1 alpha on your machine, you may find that some 1.0 sites won't load successfully on your machine (in their manifest, they may require the maintenance release as a minimum build number). This shouldn't be an issue for any consumer in the "real world" - it's purely something that will affect a developer who is living at the bleeding edge by installing alpha software on their machines.

And that’s why we’re not clearing 1.1 for "Go Live" / production usage at this stage – we don’t want it to be broadly deployed. It's not fair for us or anyone else to inflict alpha-quality software on their customer base to view a website! We'll have a solution here by MIX, but I hope this explains the intent behind the current licensing.