Testers get alpha of next version of Silverlight for Linux

The Mono team has made available a preview test build of Moonlight 3, the next version of Silverlight for Linux from Novell.

Preview 1 is downloadable from the Mono site, as of February 3.

Novell released Moonlight 2 in December 2009. Moonlight 2 is a superset of Microsoft's Silverlight 2, though it did  include support for some of Microsoft's Silverlight 3.0 features.

The new Moonlight 3 release is adding more updates to the Silverlight 3.0 programming interfaces; MP4 demuxer support (though there are no codecs for it yet); and some initial work on user interface virtualization, according to a blog post this week from Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and Novell Vice President of Developer Platforms.

With Moonlight 3, the Mono team has separated the Moonlight core from the windowing system engine, which "should make it possible for developers to port Moonlight to other windowing/graphics systems that are not X11/Gtk+ centric," according to de Icaza.

Microsoft released Silverlight 3 in the spring of 2009 and is expected to release Silverlight 4 in the first half of 2010.

Moonlight 3 is expected to be released in final form in the third quarter of this year, Novell officials said late last year.