Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days

[markwolfe Veteran]

Source: Miguel de Icaza's web log

Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days

The past 21 days have been some of the most intense hacking days that I have ever had and the same goes for my team that worked 12 to 16 hours per day every single day --including weekends-- to implement Silverlight for Linux in record time. We call this effort Moonlight.

Needless to say, we believe that Silverlight is a fantastic development platform, and its .NET-based version is incredibly interesting and as Linux/Unix users we wanted to both get access to content produced with it and to use Linux as our developer platform for Silverlight-powered web sites.

Am now on a flight to Paris to show the results of 20 days of intense work that the team has implemented. It is hard to contribute to the effort sitting on a plane when the tree is changing every 10-20 minutes.

There is technically still some time left to improve what we can show.

You can see our screenshot-log to see our progress or the Moonlight Project Planning Page.

Testing Silverlight on Linux

At this point we do not have a packaged release of Silverlight for Linux and we still have to sort out a few things that would have to be done in order to ship a ready-to-use plugin.

But if you are curious or want to contribute to the effort check our page for information on downloading, compiling and getting started with the project.

...

Read much more (including screenshots, history and other project details) in Miguel's blog.

[PL_ Veteran]

I congratulate their work, but I would have held on to see how widespread Silverlight becomes.

[Linkinfamous]

I congratulate their work, but I would have held on to see how widespread Silverlight becomes.

This can only help it become more widely adopted.

[+mrbester MVC]

I congratulate their work, but I would have held on to see how widespread Silverlight becomes.

They obviously think it is going to be widespread enough to work their nuts off porting it to Linux before most users have even heard of it...

[JustGeorge]

I would love to see this dethrone flash so OSS users won't be waiting on Adobe to update their software.

[Agnes Leroy]

They (MS) should provide more support to OSS users in a timely manner.

Edited June 26, 2007 by knight17

[Computer Guru]

I've blogged about how the Mono project is doing Microsoft's dirty work and this port of Silverlight to Linux (Moonlight) - the responses (from Slashdot, Digg, and some Linux sites) were really mixed results.

I love .NET and I love Linux. But those comments, they explain why (more or less) Microsoft will never ever support .NET on Linux, but what I found disturbing is how many hard-core Linux users are totally against Miguel and his awesome team - it's so very personal.

I disagree with what they say, I think we (Linux users and developers) can only benefit by bringing .NET and Moonlight to Linux, but many people seem to think this is "tainting the free software community," "allying with the devil," "support software patents," and "falling into Microsoft's trap."

What I really like about Silverlight for Linux/Moonlight is that it is (well, will be) 100% compatible, with the UI and all - unlike Mono which is honestly a port of C# and the CLR to Linux, and not a port of the .NET Framework seeing as it doesn't actually support (yet... ever?) the .NET UI making it, well, mostly useless for porting purposes....

[PL_ Veteran]

This can only help it become more widely adopted.

So the team behind it must obviously believe this Silverlight is really something else, OR (and more likely) they're doing work as quick as they can to avoid another reason to not use Linux.