Microsoft has announced the general availability of its Silverlight technology for the Symbian operating system running on Nokia 5th generation devices.
Microsoft
has announced the general availability of its Silverlight technology for the
Symbian operating system.
In
a July
6 blog post, Microsoft's Silverlight team announced that Silverlight, the
software giant's cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET
Framework for building media experiences and rich interactive applications for
the Web on desktop computers, is also available for Nokia S60 5th Edition
devices such as Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97 and Nokia N97 Mini.
Microsoft
is making the Silverlight tools available for Symbian developers via the Nokia Ovi Store. Microsoft
initially announced plans to deliver Silverlight for Symbian in 2008 and later released
a beta of the technology in March 2010.
Silverlight
includes a runtime that is optimized to display content on memory-constrained
devices. Silverlight support for Nokia S60 5th Edition devices includes the
ability to view Silverlight applications in the mobile browser, as well as
tools to build Silverlight applications that target devices.
Microsoft
said developers can create Silverlight-based applications for devices by using
Expression Blend 2, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1, or Visual
Studio 2008 SP1 with Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Also,
application deployment on IIS is supported in this release. The installable
executable file enables users to run Silverlight applications on the Nokia S60
5th Edition platform. The executable file includes the Silverlight runtime for
Nokia S60 5th Edition emulator, sample applications, and developer
documentation.
Microsoft's
Silverlight team said:
We
want to take this opportunity to highlight some of the incredible features in
this product:
Media: Hardware
assisted Media playback of H.264 content. This gives a great media viewing
experience using full hardware decode and hardware post processing.
IIS Smooth Streaming:
Enables users to access live and on demand media content streamed using
IIS Smooth Streaming including multiple bit rate switching.
Rich UI: Developers
get access to the Silverlight V2 surface area to create Rich Interactive
Web Applications.
.NET Programmability: .NET Compact
Framework class libraries and runtime.
In
addition, Microsoft officials said this release marks the first time that
Silverlight is shipping on a non-Microsoft mobile device platform, and the
challenge of bringing Silverlight to Nokia 5th edition devices lays the
foundation for bringing Silverlight to any other mobile platforms in future.
Also, consumer ready popular Silverlight apps like Bing, HSN, and
Billboard Live were developed in support of this port. And encoding presets are
included by default in the in Expression Encoder 4 for Silverlight for Symbian
media scenarios.
The
Silverlight for Symbian Developer Tools are available here.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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