Silverlight snippets from reMIX UK

Microsoft held reMIX UK last week in Brighton which as others have noted was an addendum to the MIX conference in Las Vegas which unfortunately came in the shadow of PDC where we should probably see a Silverlight 2 release as well as a bunch of other goodies from Microsoft. But there was some good/new Silverlight info that came out from the conference:

There were some snippets of Silverlight news, or perhaps clarifications. Guthrie said the plug-in is getting 1.5 million installations a day, and that these will upgrade automatically to version 2.0, the .NET version, when it is released later this year. Unlike the beta, Silverlight 2.0 will have proper accessibility support, but H.264 capability will not appear until a future version. Guthrie also hinted that a 3D API is under development. Further controls, such as a Rich Text Editor, will be delivered as add-ons within the lifetime of version 2.0.

The 1.5 million download number is interesting, and I'd assume that most folks are downloading the beta which will auto upgrade. I also like the strategy of rolling out components as add-ons. That would even allow them to ship third party components if required, like Telerik's Silverlight set. I'll be curious to see how that process works but it could be a great community builder if they have some way of approving and adding components instead of just a standard dot release.

PDC is shaping up to be a big deal of an event for RIA developers. Along with what I'm assuming will be a Silverlight 2 release, we should get more info about the next gen of WPF as well as some additional info (and hopefully SDKs) around Live Mesh. Microsoft has so many pieces and I like the new focus on design as well as creating a pretty wide-ranging platform on which to deploy. You get the desktop story, the browser story, the cloud story, and everything else. One thing I heard came out of reMIX UK was that they're doing a ton of API changes to Silverlight to make it more like WPF. Keep an eye on that. Silverlight can act as an up sell to WPF and by blending the two technologies it's easier to get developers to hop back and forth.