Here at Mix07 we’ve seen some impressive demos of Silverlight running on the Mac. All the demos worked; the applications looked the same on the Mac as on Windows. Scott Guthrie showed “Silverlight Airlines”, which uses .NET code to call an ASP.NET web service. You draw a line between cities to show where you want to travel, select a date, and a grid populates with the available flights. Here’s my fuzzy picture, though I imagine the demo itself may be put online soon:
Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie, here at Mix07, have announced the addition of a cross-platform .NET runtime within Silverlight, Microsoft’s browser plug-in for streaming video and rich internet applications.
I’m not sure this counts as a major announcement – after all, this very thing was talked about here at Mix last year. What is new though is that you can download the alpha from today, for Windows and Mac. Nothing has been said yet about timing, but I guess the fact that this is described as alpha implies a significant wait before a final release.
Nevertheless, this is a critical development for Silverlight, particularly as Adobe’s Flash now has a JIT-compiled Javascript runtime that in language terms is not that far removed from C#. Differentiation may be mainly in the runtime library that is available, and of course Visual Studio integration.