News

Silverlight To Run on Linux This Week

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• June 19, 2007

The demo of Microsoft's new technology for rich Internet application development is set to take place in Paris at Microsoft's Mix07 conference, and will be conducted by Miguel de Icaza, Novell's vice president of development.

De Icaza was able to prepare the early preview through the company's Mono Project, an open source development effort designed to run key Microsoft technologies, including .NET and C# applications, on Unix and Linux.

According to de Icaza, the Mono Project team developed the Silverlight implementation in 21 days. Among the features in Silverlight that appeared to be ready for the demo include most of the graphics capabilities. "We can do animations, video, all of the graphics parameters are in place," De Icaza said in an interview.

A team of seven volunteers are working nonstop on the effort.

"It's been crazy, we've been working around the clock," de Icaza said. "When they offered us the chance of going and talking about it, we said, 'Well, we could probably put something together,' and that's what we've been doing."

Novell was the first Linux distributor to forge an alliance with Microsoft back in November. In addition to offering patent protection and working jointly to offer interoperability, Microsoft sells licenses for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server to its customers.