Silverlight 3 Hits the Street

by Peter Galli on July 10, 2009 04:19pm

Microsoft Silverlight 3 is now available for download, as is the Release Candidate for Expression Blend, while the associated Expression 3 tool suite will be available within 30 days.

This media and rich Internet application solution, along with Microsoft Visual Studio, provides a highly collaborative development and design environment that simplifies the process of delivering engaging user experiences.

Silverlight remains a free runtime that almost anyone can use to deliver great Web experiences. You can find more info about this release on Scott Guthrie, the corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft's blog, while Program Manager Tim Heuer's blog has a lot of detail on all the new features.

Microsoft is also working with the open source community to ensure that Silverlight content is available to them. Earlier this year, Moonlight 1.0 was released. Moonlight is an open source project that gives Linux users access to Microsoft Silverlight content, and is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.