As more and more Silverlight sites become available, enterprise administrators are starting to ask for guidance on how Silverlight should be deployed in a corporate environment. Obviously, at one level it's as straightforward as executing the installer, but there are typically a whole ton of questions that need answering:
Fortunately, one of my colleagues, David Tesar has kindly come to the rescue and written a very comprehensive white paper that answers all these questions plus many more. The Silverlight Enterprise Deployment Guide is available for download now. We gave the white paper a trial run ourselves when Microsoft IT used SMS to deploy Silverlight internally. Download it and send it to your systems administrator today - it's worth their time to read.
Halo 3 and Silverlight are proving the ultimate combination: if you want access to all the latest and greatest Halo 3 content, then you've got to have Silverlight installed on your machine.
Today we just published the Halo 3 Game Guide online; it provides in-depth information on game play, the story so far, the key characters and the vehicles at your disposal. It's pretty neat. In honour of the imminent launch of Halo 3, the Tafiti experimental search interface is also wearing a rather attractive "Master Chief" skin. Lastly, all the Halo 3 trailer videos are of course available in high-definition exclusively using Silverlight, with a bunch more coming over the next few days.
I've been meaning to provide a general update on Silverlight progress, but life has gotten busy. Instead, I'll briefly provide you with a few links: break.com (check out the new spatial search), HSN, Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment, Terra (warning: this site is aimed at the Latin American region and their streaming servers don't offer great performance to North America or Europe), the Emmy Award site.
And lastly, if you've not seen it - check out theConverted - a utility that converts Flash SWF animations to XAML (in this case, WPF). It's very well implemented - a great way to take your Flash assets and start to build a XAML-based solution.
As I imagine almost every reader of this blog knows, yesterday we released the final version of Silverlight 1.0. It's an appropriate time to congratulate the ~100 people involved in building this first milestone in what will undoubtedly be a long journey for us.
A hidden secret - we were actually done ahead of our internal schedule: the final RC build that has been live for the last ten days really was the final release, a rare case of where a release candidate truly was a candidate for release. You've got the final version if when you right-click on a Silverlight application and choose Silverlight Configuration, the version number displayed is 1.0.20816.0. If you have an older version, it should auto-update automatically, but you can of course kick-start the upgrade simply by downloading and installing the final version over the top of an existing release.
If you go to microsoft.com in the next eighteen hours or so, you'll see that the main front page feature is a Silverlight-based promo for Microsoft Surface, an innovative new piece of hardware for "table-top user experiences" that runs WPF. While being a great demo of Silverlight, the microsoft.com feature is just the start - expect to see us use Silverlight extensively on our properties over the coming twelve months, as the Halo 3 videos and the MSN Election 08 site also demonstrate. With some independent estimates showing that Microsoft-owned properties touch as much as two-thirds of the Internet community over the course of a year, to say nothing of the many external sites like HSN, Terra, WWE, MLB, and Entertainment Tonight who have already launched Silverlight-based sites, we expect to see Silverlight become popular quickly.
More over the next couple of days, of course...