Microsoft Office 2007 Standard Can (and will) Micr

As Microsoft made plain at its Professional Developers Conference final week, there;s no finish in sight towards the listing of new functions and features it ideas to add to Silverlight.Some developers who've been about the fence about no matter whether they ought to be creating Windows programs using Windows Presentation Basis (WPF) or Silverlight programs see a light in the finish of the tunnel of confusion. Microsoft is adding far more and far more WPF attributes to Silverlight (and vice versa). But as Tim Anderson, an IT journalist/blogger mentioned last week, there's a downside to this strategy: By adding technologies like COM assistance to Silverlight, Microsoft is performing damage to its tale that Silverlight can be a cross-platform browser plug-in that supports Windows, Mac — and, thanks to the Mono folks at Novell ,microsoft Office 2010 Activation, Linux — equally.(The Register;s Gavin Clarke and I talk additional concerning the risks of generating Silverlight better on Windows than other platforms during our latest episode with the Microbite podcast.)The COM object support that Microsoft is promising for Silverlight 4, the version of Microsoft;s Web application framework/plug-in due to ship by mid-2010, is applicable to Silverlight running on Firefox or Internet Explorer on Windows only. Neither Mac OS X nor Linux support COM.Microsoft officials were quick to note that adding access to COM components was a customer request, not something Microsoft did in a vacuum. When I asked Microsoft about its programs to keep Silverlight in sync across platforms, a spokesperson sent me the following statements:“In Silverlight 4 we addressed over 8,Office 2007 Product Key,000 customer feature requests. One specific request was incorporating support for accessing COM components, enabling common enterprise scenarios such as automating Microsoft Office and providing developers easy access to hardware capabilities such as scanners and security card readers.”But check this out: Microsoft officials say they are evaluating how to add some kind of COM component access to the Mac version of Silverlight. From the aforementioned spokesperson:“Unfortunately,Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, the Mac offers no assistance for COM interfaces and we’re actively evaluating choices to get COM-like functions around the Mac.”There;s no further word on when or how Microsoft ideas to add this kind of assistance to Silverlight for the Mac.Meanwhile, it looks like Novell;s Developer Platform Vice President Miguel de Icaza is itching to create support for the new Silverlight 4 features to future implementations of Moonlight, the Novell/Mono team-developed implementation of Silverlight for Linux. After the PDC, de Icaza blogged:“For the Moonlight team,Windows 7 Professional, this means that there is a whole lot of work ahead of us to bring every Silverlight 3 and 4 feature. I think I speak for the whole Mono team when I say that this is exciting, fascinating, challenging and feels like we just drank a huge energy boost drink.”Microsoft;s latest Silverlight moves mean that Silverlight is evolving to become a universal run-time for Microsoft;s Common Language Runtime (CLR), the heart of .Net, according to de Icaza. Creating a desktop suite of Silverlight apps isn;t just a pipe dream, de Icaza said; it;s a real, doable project.Some developers are already dreaming of the possibility of a Silverlight operating system. (For some reason,Office Pro Plus 2010 Key, I think the Windows team might try to derail that effort before it could ever happen, but who knows?) Microsoft has a lot more immediate and pressing concerns, though: It needs to keep Silverlight in sync across platforms if the company plans to play up the “available everywhere” piece of its Silverlight message.