silverlight

Back in the good old days, Microsoft's Silverlight merely had to take on the mighty Flash Player.

Now Microsoft's browser plug-in has a very different challenge than Adobe Systems' rival technology: Web standards. And Microsoft, through the release of IE9 and presumably its successors, is helping to bring those standards to the real world.

Nevertheless, Redmond's engineers believe Silverlight has a future as a browser plug-in, and at Microsoft's Mix conference next week, the company will be trying to advance that future.

At Mix11, Microsoft plans to release a beta version of Silverlight 5, and augmenting … Read more

The Internet Explorer browser that's built into Windows Phone 7 devices could be getting two very important additions next year: support for HTML5 and Microsoft's Silverlight runtime.

A ZDNet report this morning says the extra functionality may come in the form of a major update codenamed "Mango" that is set for release in August or September. That's well after a rumored January or February release of a phone update that would bring long-awaited copy and paste functionality.

While the two extra Web features may not seem like game-changers, they move Microsoft's mobile browser into … Read more

Microsoft today unveiled the next iteration of its Silverlight technology, Silverlight 5, which the company said will improve things like media playback and the time it takes to develop applications, along with adding support for 3D and hardware acceleration.

"There's been a lot of angst on this topic in the last few weeks," Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president for Microsoft's developer division, told attendees of the company's Silverlight-focused Firestarter event at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. "Let me say upfront that there is a Silverlight future, and we think it's going to be … Read more

On today's show, we're totally hoping the music industry will finally catch up to reality, or at least the year 2010. Or the "tensies," as we're now calling them. Forever. Spotify is under pressure to just launch, already, but this time it's from their investors. Also, is "Farmville" on the decline because Facebook users are just narcissistic quiz-takers? --Molly

More good news for Silverlight it seems, as based on two new job postings on Microsoft's site (1, 2), the company is looking to hire additional Silverlight engineers, as well as bring the technology to more of its devices--including the Xbox.

Blog TechTrends discovered and reposted the positions earlier today, before Microsoft removed the reference to the Xbox, which was referred to as "Silverlight on the Xbox as part of the next wave." The posting has since been changed to refer to "various devices we plan to enable over the coming years."

The news comes … Read more

If there were any remaining doubts about Silverlight's importance to Microsoft, the company seems to be going out of its way to put them to rest.

Next month Microsoft is holding a Silverlight-focused, one day event both at its Redmond campus and streamed online, which is aimed at giving developers a look at what's coming next for the Silverlight platform. The event will also offer developers hands-on training sessions showing them how to make use of the runtime in Windows Phone 7 applications, online, and in native desktop software applications.

Microsoft is billing the event, which is part … Read more

This story was updated at 4:50 p.m. PDT with a new headline, and additional comment from Microsoft.

Microsoft has taken the covers off a future update to its Bing Maps service that removes the need for its Silverlight browser plug-in to view an alternate mapping layer, and has also announced that it plans to remove its 3D map viewer. The changes will arguably make the service more approachable to the masses, but indicate that the company is going in a different direction with its online tools and technology platforms.

In a post on the Bing community blog, Bing … Read more

If one thing was made clear at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference last week, it's that the software giant wants in on some of the HTML5 mojo competitors have been trumpeting over the last year or so. What wasn't made clear, however, was the future of Silverlight--Microsoft's media runtime that competes with HTML5 in a number of areas.

That much was presented to developers in the company's keynote, which encompassed updates to its virtualization and cloud computing platform, all the way to new phone apps and a platform preview of the company's update of … Read more

Microsoft will issue 14 security bulletins on Tuesday to plug 34 holes, including eight that are critical, in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SQL and Silverlight, the company said on Thursday.

"This will be the most bulletins we have ever released in a month; we have released 13 bulletins on a couple of occasions," Angela Gunn, security response communications manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. "However, in total CVE [common vulnerabilities and exposures] count, this release ties with June 2010, so there's no new record there."

Affected software includes: Windows 7; Windows XP; Vista; … Read more