In a few short hours, Microsoft will announce the release of Silverlight 1.0 to the world. Ever since those sweltering days in Vegas back in May, when Microsoft laid out the roadmap for Silverlight, there has been a tremendous buzz and excitement to what this new revolution in web technologies might bring. Today, that revolution is here.

High profile customers such as Entertainment Tonight, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the Home Shopping Network and Major League Baseball are on tap to light up their piece of the web with Silverlight. Microsoft properties such as MSN Extra, Halo 3 Preview, Tafiti and MSN Podium are on the fast track to roll out their Silverlight deployments as well. Within 12 month’s or so, all Microsoft properties deploying rich interactive features on their websites will be employing Silverlight to do so.

The biggest and most exciting news from this announcement is word that Microsoft has partnered with Novell to officially support the Moonlight project. Moonlight is an open source project chartered with building a Silverlight implementation that runs on top of Linux. There have been numerous customer questions around our plans in supporting Silverlight on Linux. Microsoft listened and is now acting on what our customers want. Silverlight is *truly* cross-platform now.