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Microsoft Update: Because Silverlight 4 isn’t quite done yet, Microsoft is providing Windows Phone 7 Series and Silverlight developers with a version of Silverlight 3 enhanced with some Silverlight 4 features, for development purposes, company officials said late last week.
Silverlight is the primary development platform for Windows Phone 7 Series. Silverlight also is a browser plug-in that enables viewing of multimedia content, the same way Adobe’s Flash does. The few smartphones that do support browser plug-ins like Flash support FlashLite, not full Flash, because the processors in phones haven’t been powerful enough to support them.
Product Manager Mike Harsh noted that Silverlight won’t run in the browser on the first generation of Windows Phone 7 devices during his presentation about developing for Windows Phone 7 at Mix last week.
“In its first release, the Windows Phone browser does not support a browser plug-in model. We are evaluating this for future releases of Windows Phone. It is very straightforward to take an existing Silverlight browser based application and re-compile it to target the Windows Phone. Silverlight 4 has not yet been released. We will be sharing more details on Windows Phone support for Silverlight 4 once both products are in the market. Stay tuned.”
Martin Bennedik one of http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft readers, questioned Microsoft’s claim that the first iteration of the Windows Phone 7 browser wouldn’t support a plug-in model. He said he was able to get Silverlight to work using the Windows Phone 7 emulator.
“My Silverlight chess board is displayed, although the screen of the emulator has a lot of flickering, and I didn’t manage to use the UI. You can verify this yourself by going to www.bennedik.de/Silverboard.html in the emulator’s browser. This wouldn’t display at all if their claim about no plug-in model would be true, I think,” he said.
Finally, as MIX 10 for Windows Phone 7 Series and Windows Mobile developers came to a close last week, Microsoft is battling claims that Windows Phone 7 Series is not going to meet enterprise users’ needs…
