Silverlight and Moonlight, the .NET RIAS

For those who do not know, these are the names for the .NET implementation of Rich Internet Applications, but for the operating systems (Windows, Mac's and Linux respectively).

Silverlight is one of the recent goodies and it is spreading all over the internet as it enables a new and rich internet experiences to client browsers.

Basically it delivers the good looks as experienced before with flash objects, but with the power of .net framework in the background (Web Services, ASP.net), Yummy...

The Silverlight's stable version at the time of this article is 2 and Moonlight, its Linux brother is 1.

I confess, I have surrendered to this technologies since quite some sometime ago....

Nevertheless there is a gap between Silverlight and Moonlight, where as expected Moonlight features are a little bit behind in time then Silverlight's.

This becomes quite obvious as developers tend to use the latest versions of Silverlight to include all the new goodies in their gadgets, and who could blame them?

I have seen spread across the web several Silverlight implementations using the version 3 which his not release as stable yet.

However for a Linux user even after installing the stable version of Moonlight, it probably still not be able to experience most of the Silverlight gadgets out there...

In the mono website the Moonlight 2 will be released in next September, so a catch up can be expected, but again when Microsoft somewhere in the near future releases Silverlight 3 as stable the loop starts again...

But nevertheless I do congratulate the mono team for their efforts not only in Moonlight but in mono in general.

Cross-Platform applications, and in this particular case RIAS, just rule...

Over & out...

Linux Operating Systems

Two of my favourite Linux Operating Systems are Ubuntu and OpenSuse.

Ubuntu is very nice as it as available many software packages. The downside of Ubuntu are the predominately problems i have every time i upgrade the operating Systems (twice a year). Whenever this upgrades happen i have to set-up everything again from scratch as it starts to malfunction. This might be ok for an advanced user but it is certainly a reason to make some users to simply give up on it.

OpendSuse is very stable, it doesn´t have so many software packages available as Ubuntu but it rocks as it as always available the latest packages of mono. If you are .NET software developer, this should be definably your choice. Most of the new cool Apps coming out on Linux are using mono so I would guess that OpenSuse might be the best choice for present and future...

There is something i really appreciate in Linux OS's, you do not need an Anti-Virus, the list of virus created for Linux based system can be counted with our hand fingers and are all known and patched. If you really think about it, how cool it is not to have that performance killer Anti-Virus or Anti-Spyware and its annoying messages on your machine? Wouldn't be nice to just not needing to have it? With a Linux based software you can have that feeling...

Of course there are many others Linux OS's, feel free to try as many as you can, but me?

I have made up my mind, i like these ones better...

What about Windows you may ask?

It is still a keeper i would say... ;)

Lift Off

Hello Everyone!! =)

Welcome to my Blog and by the way my new online Home Page.
In this web Site i will post information about my development projects.
You are invited to check it out at:

http://matosdotnet.com/ (Requires Silverlight)


Feel free to drop me a comment...

Regards.