Despite rumors that Microsoft's Silverlight platform was going to be left behind based on IE9's push for HTML 5, the Silverlight team is still hard at work on bringing the web technology to all platforms.
Microsoft has put out a job advertisement asking for a software development engineer to help bring the technology to Microsoft's Xbox 360. Silverlight has been put into full use on Microsoft's own site and is finding a place among the web media world. The technology is also the developmental basis of Windows Phone 7, although only applications, not the web plugins run Silverlight.
Bringing the Silverlight platform to the Xbox 360 will complete the implementation on all Microsoft products. This addition will also bring the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 closer as now both will support XNA and Silverlight, further allowing for games and other applications to have a true cross-platform compatibility.
Opening up the Xbox 360 in this way may help bring new and unique content to the system while at the same time allow a larger userbase to code for the platform. The job desciption specifically mentions the partners that use Silverlight and seem to suggest that Microsoft is looking for a way to bring more services instead of just games to their console, creating a media center and entertainment set-top box.
Soon Microsoft may be able to start selling their Xbox 360 game console as more of a set top box, while still promoting the vast game ability, which may be provoked by the recent influx of new TV platforms.
Integration all around and unifying a code base will allow the maximum number of developers to get started on applications and provide content to Microsoft's products.
Update: It seems that the job posting at Microsoft has been modified and the content specifically mentioning the Xbox has been removed and replaced with "targeting more devices." WMPoweruser still however has the original job description up that mentions the Xbox support.
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