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Silverlight 2.0 Ships

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Silverlight 2 shipped today. Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Its also pretty small in size ( ~4.6MB) and takes only a few seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. Finally you do not have to have the .NET Framework installed, so you are ready to go.

As far as downloads, you can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool here.

From a developer perspective, you can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby).  Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier, rich built-in controls that developers can use to quickly build applications, rich networking Support which includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services, rich .NET base class library with collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc, and rich media support with built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support). 

The thing I am most proud of is the customers that have supported the beta versions of the technology and the support that our team has given to the various projects. Here are just some.

In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up over a billion page views, 70 million video streams - making it the largest ever media event on the web.  Then, the Democratic National Convention was streamed live using Silverlight, and broadcast a 2M live video feed of the event and speeches and then this month a number of other high profile sites are going live with the final release.  CBS College Sports Network will be streaming live games for 150+ college and university partners,  AOL is launching their new AOL Mail browser using Silverlight 2,  Blockbuster will be launching their new MovieLink subscription service using Silverlight,  Yahoo! Japan is live today enabling live streaming of Major League Baseball games.  It just goes on and on.

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