Moonlight 1.0 means more Silverlight apps run smoothly on Linux

Microsoft had always promised interoperability as one of its key goals for Silverlight. The way it's accomplishing this on the Linux side of the scale is by empowering Miguel de Icaza to take the project and run with it.

This week marked an important milestone in a genuine effort to take a pretty good graphical Web applications platform and make it workable for Linux. The Mono Project, a team backed by Novell and Microsoft whose goal is to make the .NET Framework workable on other platforms, including Linux (and even, if you can believe it, Windows) has released its first non-beta version of the Moonlight 1.0 plug-in.

It's kind of a catch-up race at this point, since Moonlight 1.0 is only capable of registering itself as "Silverlight 1.0" for Web applications that request it. Already, Microsoft has moved to version 2.0, with the difference being the platform's capability to use a wider variety of .NET languages in the programming process. Silverlight 1.0 is focused on JavaScript, as is Moonlight 1.0, but that does not mean Miguel de Icaza, one of the open source scene's most interesting and even charming developers, hasn't actively been working on matching Microsoft point-by-point from the very beginning.

"Silverlight 2.0 was a major upgrade from its original announcement Silverlight 1.1," explained de Icaza on his personal blog. "It is more complete, more polished and has been future-proofed. Microsoft has continued to help us all along in creating an open source implementation of Silverlight. They have open sourced the Microsoft [Dynamic Language Runtime], the Microsoft [Managed Extensibility] framework and the crown jewels: the Microsoft Silverlight Control Library and the Control Toolkit under the OSI-approved MS-PL licenses. Without this it would have taken years for us to catch up."

In Betanews tests, we were able to find some Silverlight 1.0 demos of Web applications, such as the slideshow demo still available from First Floor Software, which performed smoothly and without incident on our testbed system with Ubuntu Linux 8.10, Firefox 3.0.3, and the Moonlight 1.0 plug-in. But a great many Silverlight apps out there -- most notably Photosynth -- still don't run on Moonlight 1.0, which unfortunately renders it fairly crippled for real-world use.

That doesn't mean Moonlight has reached its limit, however. There is still a very active beta of Silverlight 2 under development by de Icaza's Mono Project, though its explicit instructions make clear it's for developers' testing only for now.