Silverlight 1.0 is released!!! Expression Encoder is released! And announcing a big surprise...

Great news for Silverlight fans: the release to web of Silverlight 1.0 was announced this morning!  Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in to allow rich media and interactive experiences on the web.  Silverlight 1.0 includes a Javascript programming model, built-in codec support for VC-1 and WMV video plus WMA and MP3 audio, and rich graphics, animation & UI support.  It also allows for streaming of media over the web.  You can find out a lot more about the capabilities of Silverlight 1.0 at silverlight.net

 Along with this, Microsoft announced the release to the web of one of my favorite products, Expression Encoder 1.0.  Expression Encoder can be downloaded here.  It's a great tool which will encode your media for you to use in Silverlight applications.  It has a lot of slick features which I'll talk about in my next post.  Expression Encoder makes it very easy and fast for you to create and share Silverlight media on the web.

 SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT: Today Microsoft announced a partnership with Novell to provide Silverlight on Linux!  This is really exciting news!  The implementation of Silverlight on Linux will run in Frefox, Opera and Konqueror browsers and on all Linux distributions.  Moonlight, as the project is called, will support both programming models of Silverlight, that is 1.0 Javascript & 1.1 .Net.

Cross posted from Martha's Blog