CIOL: How can a Linux developer work with Silverlight? Any plans from Microsoft to unveil any tool that bridges the gap?

AS: The Moonlight project is an open source implementation of Silverlight for Linux and other Unix/X11 based operating systems. Novell, in collaboration with Microsoft, is working on the runtime and already have a version out that supports Silverlight 2.

As part of the project, Novell has entered into a covenant with us that has given them access to the Silverlight specifications, internal test suites and audio/video codecs that we ship as part of Silverlight.

In addition, the team behind eclipse4SL project is hard at work trying to bring Silverlight development to the Eclipse IDE. The Eclipse IDE is the leading development tool on the Linux platform used by countless developers every day.

The project hit feature complete in December 2008 and the source code and binaries are available for download right now.

CIOL: Where do you see Silverlight in future? Is mobile and devices support on the roadmap?

AS: As I mentioned earlier, mobile support is definitely on the way. In fact, aside from Windows Mobile, we also have the intention of supporting the Symbian (Nokia Series 60) operating system.

The goal of Silverlight for the mobile is to provide a consistent experience across the desktop and mobile phones. What is even more interesting is that a developer who writes Silverlight applications for the desktop has to change nothing for the same application to work on a mobile phone.

The same application should just work across both platforms.

In general, Silverlight’s future is to get as close as possible to our desktop presentation framework (Windows Presentation Foundation or WPF) in terms of feature parity while at the same time maintaining the cross-platform and cross-browser support.

Having said that, Silverlight will always be a great way to deliver Rich Internet Application (RIA) experiences over the web to users everywhere and WPF will remain the best way to write desktop applications that take full advantage of the client hardware. In a larger sense, Silverlight is part of what we like to call the Client Continuum.

This continuum of technologies, including HTML, AJAX, ASP.NET, Silverlight and WPF, allows Microsoft .NET Framework developers to make use of all possible media to deliver the best client experience possible.