Miguel de Icaza has an update on Moonlight, a third-party but official implemention of Silverlight for Linux.
Although progress is rapid, it is disappointing to read that a Silverlight 2.0 implementation is hardly started:
Silverlight 2.0 Other than the JIT support for Silvelright 2.0 at this point we have not done any work on it (well there are 3 classes stubbed privately).
There are two reasons for this: the updated 2.0 API is not public and although we have access to it, it is a bit of a mess to try to keep two separate trees (public and private) to support this and since Mix is just around the corner, we will just wait until next week.
The second reason is that we want to focus on shipping 1.0, completing the media pack integration and working on the configuration aspects of Moonlight (auto-update configuration for instance).
Good reasons; but the question it raises is this: by how long will Linux implementations lag the Windows and Mac releases of Silverlight? Silverlight 2.0 is hugely important because it enables .NET code to run. I constantly meet folk who are developing for Silverlight but waiting for version 2.0 as the real thing. Version 1.0 is browser JavaScript only.
More positively, at least we know that Mono already has a decent desktop implementation of .NET, so the fundamentals are there.
Hey Tim,
It is OK, today Microsoft announced that most of the high-level controls were open sourced. This amounts for a very significant chunk of the work that was missing from 1.1 to 2.0
There is a lot of new stuff in Silverlight 2.0, but this is a significant accelerator to ship this to every system.
Miguel