Announcements regarding Microsoft's Flash-killer Silverlight player are certainly coming thick and fast.

The media-oriented Silverlight 1.0 beta went live back in May at the MIX 07 conference but most of the talk was about the imminent launch of the next 1.1 player which would add .NET support for advanced programmability. Now Microsoft has begun talking about what's going to be in Silverlight 2.0...

Oh. Hang on a minute... Actually it turns out that all that is being announced is a name change: 1.1 is no more and the next version will be...(drum-roll)... "Silverlight 2.0"! As Scott Guthrie puts it:

"Previously we've been referring to this .NET-enabled Silverlight release as "Silverlight V1.1". After stepping back and looking at all the new features in it..., we've realized that calling it a point release doesn't really reflect the true nature of it. Consequently we have decided to change the name and refer to it as "Silverlight V2.0" going forward."

Can I maybe add a hint of scepticism here and point out that everyone has always known that the next version of Silverlight was going to be huge (as an indication of what's involved the size of the player is likely to be multiple times larger than the current 1MB). Silverlight 1.1 was never going to be a minor point release, in fact it's probably the make-or-break release.

And to add a little cynicism about the sudden change I wonder if anyone at Microsoft has noticed that originally calling it 1.1 had the nice effect of suggesting to authors that its seamless launch was imminent while now calling it version 2.0 gives a little more wriggle room over timing and should also encourage end user take-up with its suggestion that a 2.0 release is a relatively mature platform.

I certainly hope someone is thinking hard about things like this - this will be a major launch not just for Silverlight but for Microsoft itself.

Talking of timings Scott reveals that, as expected, the GoLive beta of 2.0 will be released in Q1 2008 which fits in nicely with the dates of the brought-forward MIX 08 in early March. However, for the all-important official launch - after all few designers are going to produce Silverlight work until end users can actually see it - it's a much more vague "next year".

And the other real news for designers is some greater depth on just what controls will be supported:

"Silverlight will deliver a rich set of controls that make building Rich Internet Applications much easier. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for core form controls (textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc), built-in layout management controls (StackPanel, Grid, etc), common functionality controls (TabControl, Slider, ScrollViewer, ProgressBar, etc) and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, etc)."

Scott's announcement: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/29/net-web-product-roadma...