If, like me, you didn’t make it to the MIX 09 jamboree you can always catch up via the videos posted over at visitmix.com - and you don’t have to go to Vegas. As expected, the major new announcement was the launch of a new Silverlight 3 runtime (though as a beta with no “go-live” licensing it’s only for developers).

Essentially Silverlight is designed to port Windows’ core WPF technology into a cross-platform  browser-based player like Flash. So what will the new version offer?

The highlights include:

• H264 / MP4 video support 
• Pixel Shaders for effects such as blurring
• Perspective Transforms to simulate 3D
• Animation Easing to produce far more naturalistic movements

“Highlights” which will probably sound less-than-exciting as they are all on the Flash 10 checklist. Far more eye-catching and the stand-out feature of the latest release is: 

• Silverlight 3’s ability to break out of the browser and install XAPs directly to the desktop 

It’s a fundamental step forward but again it sounds very familiar. After all, isn’t this exactly what AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) already provides?

Moreover the Silverlight 3 beta fails to deliver any of the “Flash-killer” WPF-based features that users might have hoped to see ported such as true 3D handling, print control and, my personal favourite, intelligently adaptive FlowDocuments. And there’s no support for video alpha either.

Overall it’s clear that Microsoft is still playing catch-up with Adobe on the Rich Internet Application (RIA) front and no doubt critics will say that, as there’s already an established standard here with all-important and unbeatable market penetration (Flash has around 97% penetration compared to around 25% for Silverlight), what is the point of Silverlight? 

It’s a subject I plan to return to. In the meantime, there was one feature which might give the Microsoft-bashers some pause for thought. Significantly, the new Silverlight out-of-browser capabilities are built directly into the version 3 runtime (under 5MB). This means that to save an online Silverlight XAP for offline use on either PC or Mac, all the end user needs to do is right-click and hit Install. And it has built-in auto update too (excellent). And you can remove the app just as easily.  

The whole RIA concept is based on the blurring of online and offline, local and remote and Silverlight’s streamlined moving between the two worlds looks like it will set the new standard.