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Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight 4 to the Web (RTW) on April 15.
As announced at the Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 launch event on April 12, Microsoft has made the Silverlight 4 technology available for download at www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight. In addition, Microsoft will deliver a release candidate of Expression Blend 4 (compatible with Silverlight 4). Go to the Expression Studio Website for more information on this.
Silverlight 4 provides media and enterprise application and media capabilities, out-of-browser flexibility, and tools support via Visual Studio and Expression Blend with Sketchflow to enable robust application development and rich interactive experiences, Microsoft said. At Microsoft’s MIX 2010 conference in March, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s .NET Developer Platform, said Silverlight adoption has continued at a rapid pace, with installations approaching 60 percent of all Internet devices worldwide-an increase of nearly 15 percentage points in just four months.
Enterprise customers such as Major League Soccer, BBC, eBay, Netflix, NBCOlympics.com and CT Corp., a Wolters Kluwer business, are using Silverlight. Also, customers such as Associated Press and eBay, and partners such as 352 Media and Planview, have announced their commitment to Silverlight 4.
Indeed, in just five months, Microsoft has gone from beta to the full release of Silverlight 4, with several milestones along the way, including the release of Silverlight 4 beta at the Professional Developers Conference in November 2009, which included enhancements for enterprise application developers; the release of Silverlight, Visual Studio and XNA Framework developer tool kits for Windows Phone 7 at MIX; and, also at MIX, the release of a release candidate of Silverlight 4.
And at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show earlier in April, Microsoft announced that is working with Intel and Broadcom to deliver the Silverlight platform to set-top boxes, connected TVs, Blu-ray players and other devices . At NAB, Microsoft also launched Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services 4 and the delivery of the Silverlight Media Framework 2.0.