Monday Microsoft announced that they’ll soon release version 2.0 of their rich Web application plug-in, which the company is pushing as an alternative to Adobe’s Flash.

Silverlight 2, however, comes with a twist. Microsoft have decided to take it one step further from the direction the plug-in was currently taking – mostly web videos – and add a portion of the Redmond company’s .Net framework technology, as well as support for modern programming languages like C#, Python, and Ruby. Videos haven’t been forgotten though, and enhanced video support will be included. Silverlight 2 can also call Web services and Atom endpoints to support componentized Web apps.
Microsoft is saying that the new version of Silverlight will be available for download on Tuesday on the Microsoft Silverlight Website, and of course automatic updates for earlier versions; however those will only come in a few weeks.
Silverlight 2 will run in Firefox, Safari and Internet explorer on Windows and Mac OS, and a version for Linux is also being developed by Novell.

Microsoft is also pushing out new development and design tools for Silverlight. Monday’s announcement also heralds Silverlight-related tools for Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio Web Developer Express and Expression blend. "The net take is, we think from a dev perspective it's a rich programming platform, and from a designer perspective, they can be a first-class citizen to work with developers," said Microsoft developer division VP Scott Guthrie at the press conference where the announcements were made.
Guthrie also mentioned that Microsoft is developing Web applications with Silverlight in the next months. According to him, Microsoft will announce new products and technologies that are to "take pretty big advantage of Silverlight" in the near future. Microsoft has already used Silverlight in more than 100 marketing campaigns on their site, but has still to release a full-fledged product developed with it. Maybe this is because this wasn’t a realistic prospect up until now. The extended development options built in to Silverlight 2 should give programmers much more freedom and flexibility.

Aiming to attract external, open source developers, Microsoft also announced that aside from Visual Studio, they will also fund the development of Silverlight support in the Eclipse Foundation’s open-source development environment.

This relates to what Microsoft developer platform group director Brian Goldfarb calls "commitment to openness and interoperability" in Silverlight. That also includes new open source controls that Microsoft is releasing on its CodePlex open source forge under the Microsoft Public License, and the Silverlight XAML Vocabulary the company is making available for free and with few restrictions under its Open Specification Promise.

Microsoft couldn’t have heavier opposition to face, since its main competitor in this area, Adobe Flash, is installed on pretty much every web-enabled computer in the world. Microsoft, however are confident, and they’re bragging that Silverlight is within reach of 25% of computers worldwide, and some countries have it installed on 50% of computers. We’ll see if they live up to their great expectations.