Microsoft releases Silverlight 2, already reaching one in four consumers worldwide

Silverlight 2 delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences.

Microsoft also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundation's integrated development environment (IDE) and by providing new controls to developers with the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) under the Microsoft Permissive License.

"We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed,"

said Vimal Sethi, Director, Developer and Platform Group, Microsoft Gulf.

"It is without doubt, one of the fastest-growing browser plug-ins in history, both in terms of customer adoption and consumer installations. Silverlight represents a radical improvement in the way developers and designers build applications on the Web. This release will further accelerate our efforts to make Silverlight, Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Studio the pre-eminent solutions for the creation and delivery of media and rich Internet application experiences."

Silverlight adoption continues to grow rapidly, with penetration in some countries approaching 50 percent and a growing ecosystem that includes more than 150 partners and tens of thousands of applications. In the Gulf, several customers are successfully piloting the new web technology and partners have been trained on the application.

A leading web agency in Dubai, Impact Proximity, recently received training on Silverlight. Speaking about the product, Syed Azeem Afzal, Technical Director said, "We use bandwidth intensive applications in our daily work so it was imperative for us to ensure that our video player environment be both consumer friendly and robust. Silverlight was the perfect choice to help develop and power our new, exclusive online collegiate sports experience, as it features the best price and performance of any streaming media solution on the market today. Silverlight also gives us the most flexibility in expanding the product in the future as we develop embeddable players and mobile platforms and explore new advertising integration opportunities."