Silverlight Release Candidate due before end of July
Microsoft expects to deliver the near-final test release of its Silverlight alternative to Flash before July is over, according to a blog posting from a Microsoft technical evangelist.
Microsoft officially unveiled the beta of Silverlight 1.0 at its Mix '07 conference in April. The company also announced at that time the availability of an alpha of Silverlight 1.1, which adds a built-in Common Language Runtime engine, plus support for ASP.Net Ajax, Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), JavaScript, Visual Basic, C#, Python and Ruby. (No update so far on the status of Silverlight 1.1.)
Silverlight is a Web browser plug-in for playing media files and displaying interactive Web applications that was formerly codenamed "Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere," or WPF/E.
Tim Sneath, a Microsoft client platform technical evangelist, posted the update on Silverlight availability to his blog on July 13:
"In just a couple of weeks, we'll be ready to publish the Release Candidate of Silverlight 1.0 to the web. We're in the final stages of stabilization as we close in on launch; fixing the last few bugs, doing detailed security penetration testing work, resolving any remaining inconsistencies and completing the last fit and finish work."
Sneath and his colleagues are talking about the release candidate now in order to help developers who've been working with the early code avoid some of the Silverlight changes that could break their pages, Sneath said.
Microsoft is making available for download a "special preview SDK (software development kit) release that will allow Silverlight developers to make sure their Silverlight objects work on both the March beta and the soon-to-be-released release candidate, Sneath added.
The final gold version of Silverlight 1.0 is due to ship this summer.