Microsoft hosts demo of Silverlight on Linux in Paris

Olivier Rafal

At an event to promote Microsoft Corp. technologies in general, and the Silverlight cross-platform interface runtime in particular, Microsoft France asked Miguel de Icaza, head of the Mono project at Novell Inc. to demonstrate Silverlight running on Linux, using Mono's open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net technology.

Microsoft has said it has no intention of porting Silverlight to Linux itself, considering it sufficient to distribute it on Windows and Mac OS X

Given that, De Icaza decided that his team would take on the task -- although, he said, "when Marc Jalabert [manager for platforms and ecosystems at Microsoft France] called me three weeks ago, we had nothing...."

De Icaza didn't start to take an interest in Silverlight until the announcement of version 1.1 (still in alpha), because version 1.0 (still in beta) only concerned JavaScript. It was only with version 1.1 that the .Net framework came along, allowing development in languages designed for .Net.

After three weeks of development ("night and day") the Mono team built a prototype of Moonlight, or Silverlight for Mono. De Icaza, visibly pleased to return to his Suse machine after a few minutes using one running Vista, asked the audience to excuse the design of the demonstrations before using it to show a few animations: "Not very exciting," he said, but at least showing that it's feasible.