Moonlight


 *  Check out 5 things to know about Moonlight 

Mono-based implementation of Silverlight. The goals are:


 * To run Silverlight applications on Linux.
 * To provide a Linux SDK to build Silverlight applications.
 * To reuse the Silverlight engine we have built for desktop applications.

Roadmap

 * Moonlight 1.0
 * Release in June 2008
 * Compatible with Silverlight 1.0
 * Complete media pipeline
 * improve performance
 * integration of Microsoft Media Pack


 * Moonlight 1.1
 * Implements Silverlight 1.1
 * Missing a few things


 * Moonlight 2.0
 * Late 2008 at the earliest
 * Virtual Machine changes

Support
Moonlight support for Silverlight
 * Silverlight 1.0 ?
 * Silverlight 2.0 Other than the JIT support for Silvelright 2.0 at this point, not done any work on it (March 2008)



Tools to develop Moonlight

 * Moonlight compiler (smcs)
 * MonoDevelop IDE

Novel-Microsoft agreement
In September 2007, Microsoft and Novell reached an agreement over Moonlight.

Novell

 * Delivers a 100% compatible Moonlight
 * Support on all major Linux distribution/platforms

Microsoft provides

 * Media Pack for all Moonlight users on Linux (everything that has to do with media) (available around late-March)
 * regression test suites
 * complete specification for implementation

Moonlight will also use Silverlight 2 controls (which are open source) in its implementation.

Moonlight desklets
A framework exists to run Silverlight applications as native applications on the desktop (as opposed to the web).

The desklets are Silverlight applications that run in standalone mode, with full access to the entire Mono API stack (as opposed to be limited to the .NET subset for the web) and that can optionally render without frames.

These Silverlight desklets are run using the  command.

More information and screenshots regarding mopen and Moonlight desklets are available on Miguel's blog. (blog post 1, blog post 2)

Platform support

 * Linux
 * Firefox 2
 * Firefox 3 beta 5 with Moonlight is very buggy
 * Moonlight will work on 64 bit browsers, some of our developers develop on Linux x86-64
 * In the last few days, some of our engineers landed support for Opera and WebKit on Linux,
 * No SPARC support
 * No SPARC support