Microsoft has unveiled the release candidate of its Silverlight 4 browser plug-in and outlined its developer strategy for Windows Phone 7 Series, which puts Silverlight applications at the heart of the company’s mobile application marketplace.
Silverlight is installed on 60 percent of internet-connected devices, Scott Guthrie, head of Microsoft’s developer division, said in a keynote speech announcing the release at the company’s MIX user experience conference on Monday.
“As the browser, server, web, and devices evolve, a focus on delivering consistently great user experiences has become paramount,” Guthrie said. “By extending our familiar platform technologies and tools to phones, Microsoft is delivering the… application development experience across a variety of devices and form factors.”
The release candidate of Silverlight 4 adds a handful of new features, getting the platform ready for an April launch. The most significant addition is a version of the Pivot visualisation toolkit, originally a Live Labs research project. Pivot is designed to help users explore large amounts of data, including large graphical databases such as photo and stock image libraries.
Applications will also have access to Windows mobile features such as Microsoft Location Service (with user permission), as well as a Microsoft Notification Service. The latter can deliver information to a phone from inside applications or from the cloud, even when an application is not running. That capability is essential, as Silverlight applications for Windows Phone 7 Series are suspended when users switch to another tool.
Applications will only be available through Microsoft’s new Windows Phone Marketplace, and there is no option for developers to use any tool other than Silverlight or XNA.
Microsoft also confirmed that not all the hardware APIs will be available in the first release of Windows Phone 7 Series.
Source: ZDNet
