For years, Flash has been the forerunner for developing cross-platform web applications. When Silverlight was released many people dismissed it as an alternative because it was lacking cross-platform support. However, today that has all changed. I am pleased to announce that version 1.0 of Moonlight, a Linux-based Silverlight plug-in, has been officially released.

The Moonlight project was a precursor to the Mono project which was aimed at porting the .NET framework to *nix systems. Both projects are sponsored by Novell who is committed to making Linux a first-class platform for multimedia and Rich Internet Applications. The Moonlight plug-in will be available for all major Linux distributions including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Redhat and Ubuntu. The release is a result of the technical relationship established by Microsoft and Novell which has helped to provide increased inoperability between Windows and Linux. In addition to the Moonlight plug-in, Microsoft is also offering a set of codecs which will allow Linux users to use a wide variety of WMV and WMA formats in addition to MP3.

The Mono project founder and Developer vice president at Novell, Miguel de Icaza, stated "Moonlight brings the benefits of Silverlight's popular multimedia content to Linux viewers. This first release delivers on the goal of breaking down barriers to multimedia content and creating parity in the user's viewing experience regardless of whether the user is on Windows or Linux."

The Moonlight plug-in is currently available for download as a Firefox plug-in and it can be installed using only a single click. The plug-in is a Silverlight 1.0 implementation which means that Javascript does all the heavy lifting in the release. A Silverlight 2.0 compliant release will mean the implementation of a ECMA CLR execution engine which means a lot of sleep less nights for Miguel de Icaza. If you are interested in test-driving Moonlight then you can head over to Novell's website and download the Live CD.