Silverlight Announced

Today we announced Microsoft Silverlight at the NAB conference down in Las Vegas. You might have seen the name "WPF/E" in quotes before, signifying that it was a code name, and like all code names, they're eventually replaced with a real product name, especially once they catch on! This time however, we didn't settle for something long, boring and traditional like "Cross-platform Rich Internet Application Foundation." :-) Instead, the product name and brand, "Silverlight" and its corresponding logo called "the nebula" are so much more cooler and exciting.

Video and media playback is one of the key scenarios that’s being highlighted today. Silverlight also provides scriptable and interactive XAML-based vector graphics and animation as you might have seen from the CTPs. These enable some pretty compelling media experiences that should fit right in there with AJAX applications. At MIX07 you’ll see much more of the programming model aspects of the technology that should appeal even more to developers. As I alluded to in my post last week, one of the sessions I’ll be presenting, shows how Silverlight can be used to develop AJAX server controls, and how Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX play together.