Silverlight 2.0 Beta-1 now available, version 1.0 ported to Nokia mobiles
Microsoft has just released highly anticipated first beta of Silverlight here. The development tools for visual studio 2008 can be downloaded from here. Tutorials are also available on the same site.
This link reports that Silverlight is now also available on the Nokia mobile devices (specifically S60 on Symbian OS, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets). It seems really strange that silverlight wasn’t ported to window mobile devices first. There is a version available for window mobiles as well. I hope it is better than flash lite which really sucks.
If the performance of Silverlight is anywhere near flash then it could be a huge success for Microsoft as .Net as a development platform is already very popular and developers can use their existing skills to create better web experiences. Also IronPython and IronRuby (two of the Silverlight programming languages) are much better (and faster?) languages than Actionscript and .Net provides a much bigger library set.
*Update- I just checked out the demo controls page here and its performance is just fine. I felt no lag while using the demo controls. The mouse wheel still doesn’t work (this site demonstrates how to use mouse wheel in silverlight. here is another example) and the controls look like they need a bit more polish.
Here is the list of controls available with Silverlight Beta-1
This screenshot was taken from Expression Blend 2.5 march preview which can be downloaded from here.
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