Microsoft adds .Net services support to Silverlight

By Simon Aughton

Posted on 1 May 2007 at 09:11

Microsoft has announced several key additions to the Silverlight Web-based media technology that it announced just a fortnight ago.

Ray Ozzie, the company's recently appointed chief software architect, explained to a Web industry gathering in Las Vegas how Silverlight fits into the company's overall strategy and its .Net platform.

'Silverlight is an important aspect of our software-plus-services strategy focused on delivering great user experiences that span the Web, the PC and mobile devices,' he said. 'It does so, in part, by bridging technical barriers that previously made it difficult for Web developers and designers to collaborate. As a result, Silverlight will play an important role in helping advance the Web with a platform for creating rich, interactive experiences.'

To that end the company has included dynamic language support, service integration and new developers' tools in a new 1.1 Alpha release for Web developers to evaluate.

Based on the .Net Framework, Silverlight 1.1 Alpha adds: support for .Net features including asp.net AJAX and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) language, with full IntelliSense editing enabled for client and server code; cross-platform debugging capabilities; and rich language support for JavaScript, Visual Basic, C#, Python and Ruby.

Microsoft also announced the next version of Visual Studio, codenamed Orcas, will include support for building Silverlight applications. It also confirmed that similar support has been included in Expression Studio software suite.