Microsoft has announced Silverlight 1.0, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering Rich Internet Apps (RIA) on the Web. Silverlight works with all the major browsers including IE, Firefox, and Safari.

Microsoft unveiled new Silverlight customer experiences on Entertainment Tonight, HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment. Major League Baseball and Disney Interactive also have amazing demos of Silverlight.

Miguel de Icaza and the Mono team at Novell will implement open source versions of Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 1.1 that will run on Linux. Novell has a clever name for their version called Moonlight.

Silverlight delivers very high quality video with no jerky motion and buffering issues. Silverlight can progressively download and play media content from any web-server.  You can point Silverlight at any URL and it will download/play in any browser.  No special server software is required, and Silverlight can work with any web-server, including Apache on Linux.

Microsoft is very serious about delivering great tools for designers and developers on both the PC and Mac, and for Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers. Microsoft is working closely with Novell to make it available on Linux as well. Here are my high level take aways on this announcement;

Designers and Developers can work together and use the same tools. Microsoft Expression tools for web designers, Visual Studio for web developers, and Silverlight for cross web browser and cross platform support. The combination of great tools for building applications and Silverlight for cross platform distribution creates real synergy for developers, web site owners, and users.

Developers can use their language of choice. With Silverlight you can code in C#, Javascript, Visual Basic, Python and Ruby. And because the the CLR (Common Language Runtime) the code can be deployed on the desktop or on the web across platforms.

Silverlight Streaming - hosting and streaming for FREE. Silverlight Streaming allows users to host their Silverlight content and apps on Microsoft servers, taking advantage of the global data centers and content delivery network. It supports up to 4GB of content, and allows streaming up to 1 million minutes of on-line video delivery at  DVD quality.

Get all the details at http://www.silverlight.net/