Moonlight 1.0 Release

I am excited to announce that Novell today released version 1.0 of Moonlight, and is making it available for download at no cost with support for most major Linux distro’s (including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu). For those unfamiliar with it, Moonlight is a joint effort between Novell and Microsoft of an open-source implementation of Silverlight for Linux.

My team has worked closely with Miguel de Icaza and his team on the project.  We are also shipping the Microsoft Media Pack – which is a set of licensed media codecs that enable playback for all Silverlight compatible media (wmv, wma, mp3, etc.), as a free download for Linux users who run Moonlight.

Moonlight enables Linux users to view Silverlight content and Silverlight applications.  Recently the official Presidential Inauguration Committee broadcast the inauguration of President Barack Obama using Silverlight.  Over 50,000 viewers using Linux installed Moonlight and watched the event live using it.  Miguel de Icaza and the volunteers behind Moonlight made a tremendous effort to make sure that Linux users were able to watch the broadcast of the inauguration, even though the official release of Moonlight was still a few weeks away.

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I am really excited about the awesome work Miguel and his team at Novell have done, and we’re looking forward to seeing Moonlight 2 (a Silverlight 2 compatible implementation with .NET support) which the team is hard at work on. For more details on the Moonlight 1.0 release, check out Miguel’s blog post on it.

Thanks,

Scott

33 Comments

  • Excellent work Miguel and team. It's great that MS are helping out where possible with this effort.

  • Hi,
    thank you for the great vision! Silverlight, as many of us suspected, is going to change the web forever. Will this next release resolve the font and line rendering issues? I find it very hard to get past the POC stage once my clients see my SL2 apps. Thanks again. It is increadibly difficult to explain all the benefits to a non-technical person who sees plain html blowing my apps away in crispness. If my SL2 apps looked like how this page looks right now on my browser there would be no stopping me ;-)

  • Great work :).
    Looking forward MIX09, Can you tell us some idea what is going be there?

  • That will make Silverlight applications to be widely used.

  • This is another step forward for silverlight

  • Whoa! Thanks Scott.

  • Hey Now Scott,

    Moonlight 1.0, great news for Silverlight.

    Thx 4 the info,
    Catto

  • So does that mean that Microsoft is more flexible towards "moonlight"-ing? [Sorry for the pun ;)]

  • So, what does this mean for Mono? If Microsoft supports this effort, does that mean that Microsoft also supports Mono? There is always talk that Mono is not a safe technology to invest in, because at any time Microsoft can use its patents or copyright to 'kill' Mono.

    What I mean is this: if a company deploys an app as Silverlight/Mono, is it a good idea to develop the serverside of the app on Linux using Mono?

  • Unfortunately it only works in Firefox and not epiphany...

  • Scott: this may be a silly question but I do not see anywhere in your post or the novell press release any mention of what moonlight 1.0 is compatible with...

    is ML 1.0 the same as SL 1.0 ??
    or (I hope?) ML 1.0 is compat with SL 2.0 ??

  • Great news and exelent work Miguel and his team. Seems I need to start improving my SL skills finally :)

  • Is there a way to seperate comments from ping backs? I want to see comments all I get are ping backs.

  • Excellent news. Congrats to your and Miguel's teams! Yet another reason to bet on Silverlight as the RIA platform of choice.

  • Cool.....

  • It's a great news. Silverlight is been "everywhere". Even tought in Linux.

  • Awesome work! I just wish Mono also included support for WPF. The gov't agency I work for is afraid of browser-based apps. :(

  • Thank You for pushing this to completion... This opens all kinds of new doors now.

  • Glaad to hear this. Adoption of Silverlight on a wide range of platforms is essential to its success. It has a long way to go, but this is a key step to getting there.

  • This is the best news i've heard all day, Our users will be happy.

  • Good to see strong and professional support for open source. Great work for increasing our target audience.

  • Thanks for helping the Mono guys. You did the right thing.

  • Couldn't there be a possibility that we have silverlight installtion [not moonlight] in next SL release [i.e. 3.0] which will also run on the linux.And same code will run on both windows and linux so that i don't have to make linux version of my site.
    In this case there will be a great boost in SL application distribution and development.

  • @kamii47 - Microsoft is providing the Moonlight guys with heaps of support, so there is NO reason to think you would need to make a "linux version of (your) site".

    Moonlight 1.0 passed all the (relevant) unit tests Microsoft supplied to Novell, and was running the SAME Silverlight XAPs on Linux for the inauguration site that Windows and Macintosh users were. The Microsoft installer site even detects and forwards Linux users correctly.

    Three Silverlight 1.0 sites that I have been involved in worked seemlessly on Moonlight (silverlightearth.com, racereplay.net, diyads.com.au) without ANY modifications. Each site uses different Silverlight features (layout, animation, complex Xaml respectively).

    Further, Moonlight 2.0 already seems well advanced; to the point where it can display Photosynths (eg. the inauguration one on CNN) via the 'beta' Silverlight 2.0 Photosynth viewer (Mac users rejoice)! The Photosynth viewer is NOT a trivial application, so I think that is a good indication that Moonlight will be a fine host for any Silverlight application you can dream up.

    Plus Novell can do other cool things with Moonlight that perhaps MS wouldn't - like leverage the Mono/Unity model to bring it to iPhone at some point, and probably Android too. All that will provide a REALLY great boost for all Silverlight applications and developers.

  • The download link to the The asp:ListView control (Part 1 - Building a Product Listing Page with Clean CSS UI) article appears to be broken. Any chance to still get the archive?

  • Do you know if moonlight is going to be the path that Microsoft uses to get Silverlight compatibility on Symbian/Nokia platform? Almost a year ago, it was announced by MS and Nokia that MS was going to develop a Silverlight version for Nokia (or at least Symbian) platform. It is nearly a year later and still nothing. Microsoft will not succeed in getting Silverlight off the ground when it is not supported on Symbian (which has and will continue to have the largest installed base of Mobile smartphones for some time). Microsoft could kill Flashlite if it embraces Silverlight for Symbian, but if it fails to avail itself of this opportunity, it will only continue to fragment the market.

  • And you call Silverlight 2.0 something to catch up with?

    For one it cannot even open an SSL stream and without killing that browser RAM with simplest tab and a button.

    Someone really needs to cut all the weed at Redmond and make those devs program something more serious techniques than browser hanging agile principles.

  • Great New...

    thanks for sharing, that's useful for me...

  • Hi,
    Actually I have a question I don't have your email address.I have question about Asp.net web part.
    I have a user control which has web zone. If I want to use this control more than 1 time on any page like
    if this is a address control then I drop this control twice for home and Business address.
    but I got a Exception of "wpzAddress webzone is already added".
    Kindly tell me any suggestion.

  • Hi Scott,

    Let me ask the legal question a different way. When will Microsoft submit the rest of XAML to ECMA? Enough to do SilverLight anyway. WPF is another question.

    Thanks,

    Vlad

  • What is the instruction count limit for PixelShader's in Silverlight 3? Since they are executing on the CPU there shouldn't be a limit. Are these shaders limited to ps_2_0?

  • Excuse my ignorance but, is novell still in the picture?

    I remember the old dayz of Novell 'Lantastic' !! LOL

    I thought it was dead already.

  • It was really great! thanks for sharing this great information.

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