As many of you may already know Microsoft if trying to edge their way into the embedded Web tools department. With Adobe holding a huge market share on web objects, Microsoft decided to compete with their own product called Silverlight. Unlike Flash, Silverlight delivers a familiar and intuitive development environment similar to Visual Studio and the Windows Presentation Foundation. In fact, you can develop SilverLight applications with Visual Studio if you have all the proper modules and add-ons installed.

Although Microsoft already supports the major browsers on Windows and MAC OSX, they seem to have left the Linux users hanging. Considering that many Netbooks are being sold with Ubuntu Linux, I would think Microsoft would get down and dirty and get those Silverlight plug-ins out, especially if they want to compete with Adobe Flash. From a web developer and designers point of view, they will want to develop websites that are viewable by everyone. Flash is still the web developers and designers choice because no matter what platform the end users is using, their Flash will have a consistent look and feel. SilverLight does the same thing, except Microsoft is lacking in the plug-in department for Linux and some browsers.

Microsoft’s un-official answer is that Novell is working on a Linux version called Moonlight. Moonlight is supposed to be compatible with SilverLight 2.0 and below. Again I have to address another point that web developers won’t want to have to worry if their product will work with third party plug-ins, another downer. Moonlight currently only supports Silverlight 2.0 and below and Moonlight (SilverLight) 3.0 hasn’t even been started based on what I could find on the official Moonlight webpage.

With the exception of tools such as Visual Studio, SilverLight needs to be cross platform supported like Flash or the realy deb developers will never adopt the awesome product. SilverLight is very cool and in my opinion better than Flash as far as what you can do, but we really need that cross browser and cross platform support.

Note: Microsoft’s official FAQ on Silverlight says: “Linux. For the system requirements, please refer to the Mono Project’s Moonlight Web site.” so don’t expect anything from Microsoft directly anytime soon. http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/faq/default.aspx#sys-req