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You can’t have missed the fact that we announced the release of Silverlight 2.0 earlier today.

Scott Guthrie has the details of the release on his blog;

Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2.  You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here.

Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development

Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser.

Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn’t already have it.  It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run – the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications.

There are several components of the announcement that are interesting to me, but one in particular stands out. Computerworld NZ caught it, we are kicking off an open source project that has the goal of enabling the development of Silverlight applications using Eclipse;

Microsoft is funding a French open-source project to build tools to enable programmers to use the popular open-source Eclipse framework to write Silverlight applications, said Brian Goldfarb, a director in Microsoft’s developer platform division, in an interview last week. This should also let Eclipse programmers share their Silverlight applications with developers working in Microsoft’s Visual Studio framework, Goldfarb said. The project is being hosted on SourceForge.

Finally, over on the Eclipse blog you will find a post that confirms that the project is ready to go, the post is rightly titled “Interesting Times Indeed“;

Now the fact that we have a new project proposal is not in itself very interesting. We have those all the time. What is new and interesting about this one, however, is that it is being supported by our friends at Microsoft. That’s right, Microsoft is funding our member company Soyatec to develop Eclipse tools for Silverlight. This project is not only building development tools for Silverlight, it is also focused on easing the integration of Java-based web sites and services with Silverlight applications.

So there you have it, a new version of the cross platform capabilities that Silverlight offers, along with a cross platform development capability being built in the open source world.