Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1 Rolls Out With Improvements

While betas of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 platform have been available for a number of months after being announced in the last half of 2008, their free software implementation of Silverlight, which is known as Moonlight and developed largely by Novell with the Mono developers, has lagged behind. Only today has the first beta release for Moonlight 2.0 been released. While Moonlight 2.0 is largely focused on implementing Silverlight 2 features, a few Silverlight 3 features did manage to work their way into this release.

Moonlight 2.0 brings the Silverlight 2 features like the embedded CLR along with support for an open-source toolkit, adaptive streaming support, and many more features. Some of the Silverlight 3 features that were integrated into Moonlight 2.0 include animation easing functions, support for custom media decoders, and support for a RGBA memory buffer to do its own low-level rendering. Other Silverlight 3 features that require more extensive modifications will then come with Moonlight 3.0.

More information surrounding the Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1 release is available in this blog post. Moonlight can be downloaded from the Mono Project.