Microsoft launches Silverlight -- formerly WPF/E -- to compete with Flash

Microsoft says you can now watch high-definition video (wmv) and run rich media applications in a browser, using new plug-in software that runs on both PCs and Mac OS X.

This has been coming for a while. At Christmas I wrote a column about putting applications online, which covered the "Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) browser plug-in, which was announced is 2005 and is now available in a preview version". In an earlier blog post, I'd also suggested that it "would stand more chance of success if it had a snappier name".

Well, Microsoft's Tim Sneath has revealed on his blog that the new name for WPF/E is Silverlight, and there's a press release and a fact sheet (doc).

Sneath has a list of 10 reasons why you (as a developer) might want to use Silverlight, one of which is that there's more to come. However, there are two big advantages over Flash. First, it lets you create user interfaces in XAML, which means plain text that you can edit in Notepad: it's not a closed binary format. (Obviously Microsoft hopes you'll buy its new Expression range of design tools instead.) Second, you can also create Windows Vista user interfaces in XAML, and "almost 100%" compatibility should save a huge amount of rework: developers can deploy the same UI as a desktop application, as a thin client, and on the Web.

Also, to quote a couple of Sneath's claims:

It supports playback of WMV files on both PC and Macintosh, with many options for interactivity during playback; with just a couple of lines of code, you can provide a platform-neutral way to handle all your movie files. Silverlight supports full-screen 720p video and offers seamless transitions between full-screen and windowed mode without losing your position in the video (something that media sites are crying out for today).

Silverlight is both client- and server-agnostic. There's no difference between the Macintosh and PC runtimes; you don't need any Microsoft software on the server if you don't want to - you can deliver a great Silverlight experience from an Apache / Linux server to a Mac OS 10.4 client.

Microsoft's 10 site has a video that you can watch online or download for iPod, PSP and Zune.

Web developers (whereistom) can get a better idea of how UI designers and programmers can work together with XAML from a Channel 9 video from the UK MCS User Experience team.