I've posted a few times about issues relating to enterprise distribution of Silverlight, and I thought I'd mention one additional topic that came up during a customer tour that I've been on for the last ten days.
If you're a systems administrator, one of the aspects of Silverlight that concerns you is probably controlling the distribution of updates. In general, enterprises like to control their desktop and laptop environments to ensure no sudden surprises are caused (for example, by a runtime update that breaks a commonly used application). So some people may wish to dial down the update settings that are optimized for end-users when Silverlight is running in a corporate environment.
Silverlight supports enterprise rollout via WSUS and we provide guidance on how to roll it out across an enterprise via other means such as Group Policy (using the EXE-based installer). Silverlight is installed via a normal MSI plus an MSP-based patch which can be chained through a variety of means. Updating Silverlight to the latest revision can be done automatically or manually (by pushing out the latest MSP).
There are two different knobs an enterprise administrator can turn to control how updates are applied to the runtime:
If an enterprise disables the LUA patching feature in MSI and does not give their users administrative access to machines then users will not be able to install, remove or patch Silverlight. Only the enterprise administrator could touch the files. Obviously, it's important that someone is actively monitoring and distributing patches; as with any runtime for any operating system, without any means to fix potential security vulnerabilities, users' machines are at risk.
Many thanks to Bob Pomeroy for providing the technical detail behind this post. Hopefully this is helpful to those of you who need to persuade your IT department that Silverlight is "safe" for corporate adoption.
We released a minor maintenance update to Silverlight 1.0 over the weekend (internally known as GDR3, where GDR stands for "General Distribution Release"). I'm sure most readers of this blog already have Silverlight 2 Beta 1 installed on their own machines, but if you're building a site for the tens of millions of users that already have Silverlight installed on their machine, you'll be pleased to know that we're continuing to service the 1.0 release to take account of customer-reported issues.
The latest release is live now on the web for both Mac and PC; it reports itself as 1.0.30401.0 (where the build number indicates that it was compiled on April 1st). The changes are minor in nature and shouldn't affect existing applications; they include an audio bug fix for nForce 4 motherboards, an update to support custom parameters in ASX playlists, fixes to font support on Mac OS X Leopard and improved multi-language support during installation and update.
As ever, the way to check which version you're running is to right-click on some Silverlight content and choose the Silverlight Configuration context menu option; on a Macintosh, it's visible by browsing to the Silverlight run-time in its installation location in the browser Plug-Ins folder. Incidentally, it seems that most people don't realize that we publish release notes that highlight the deltas from one release to another (admittedly, the link is pretty buried, so it's worth adding to your favorites).
The jolly chaps at Conchango are setting up a user group in London to focus on Silverlight, and the first meeting is tomorrow! By chance I'm actually in the UK right now on something of a customer tour, so I plan to be there myself and give a bit of a status update on Silverlight 2 and WPF. Should be a fun evening - pizza and beer is provided, and the event kicks off at 6:30pm.
Full details and registration information are on the Facebook event site or on one of the Conchango blogs. If you're working in London, why not head over to London Bridge and come and say hi?