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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.