Silverlight, - the app formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere - was officially released at Mix07. We saw a preview of Silverlight at FOWD in London a couple of weeks ago and while some may simply look upon this as Microsoft’s attempt to do battle with Adobe’s Flash, Microsoft at least sees it as something quite unique.

Of particular interest is that Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. This means you can code in a number of languages such as C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. At its core Silverlight’s aim seems to be to take desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web. From what we hear they may well have accomplished this. User adoption may yet take some time but like it or not Microsoft is still a major power house and the masses will likely accept it with far greater speed and trust than they initially did with Flash. Time will tell.