Microsoft needs Silverlight to be optimized for all platform that it runs on, alleged Brian Goldfarb, director of developer as well as user experience platforms at Microsoft, all through an interview at the company's Professional Developers Conference (PDC).

Silverlight runs on Mac OS X as well as Windows; it is presented on Linux throughout Mono Moonlight, a Microsoft supports. I also guess that Moonlight will be running on Android in near prospect. Goldfarb explained that it was not sufficient for Silverlight to "run everywhere," but that it must "light up" exact platforms.

Microsoft wants to think screen size as well as additional aspects of a device, which is mainly relevant in the mobile space, he explained. There are also mobile platform features for example SMS, phone dialing, along with address books that Silverlight might exploit, he added. That would let Silverlight applications to be customized for smartphones.

Silverlight 4, which Microsoft declares at PDC, will let applications to access Windows features, hardware, with the local file system. That let devices for instance Webcams to access by Silverlight. But, the same level of optimization is not at present being offering for additional platforms.

Microsoft will provide Silverlight "trusted" access local resources on Macs, meaning that all features work apart from for COM integration, Goldfarb alleged. More work is required to expand Silverlight for non-Windows platforms, Goldfarb admitted, saying that the corporation was "thinking around" the thought of extensions.

COM is a Windows expertise that allows applications that could have been written in unusual languages to converse with all other. Microsoft Office makes heavy employ of COM. "We are aggressively evaluating the most excellent way to get COM like features on additional platforms," Goldfarb wrote in a follow up e-mail.

To that end, the corporation has started an open source project called Managed Extensibility Framework for .NET as well as Silverlight. The Mono team is running on a corresponding project, Goldfarb alleged. He imagines that Mono will "accelerate dramatically" in the near prospect, delivering more features to Linux users.

I expect that something but Windows will be a second-class Silverlight citizen for some time. But Microsoft is building strides to delivering an optimized occurrence on additional platforms, as well as in doing so, will gain a foothold on the Web beyond Windows.