While I was at Mix 07 as a guest of Microsoft, I had an opportunity to witness some amazing products that were coming in the near future. The one I found the most impressive was a technology called Silverlight. The “canned” answer to what Silverlight is, is: Microsoft® Silverlightâ„¢ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

For the three of you that I haven’t told about it yet, here’s some cool examples to see what’s capable:

Tafiti – Silverlight Search Engine based on Live Search

Halo 3 Trailers

Major League Baseball Video Streaming

Anyways, the point of this post is to announce that Silverlight 1.0 has been released! You can go to http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/ now to download the final release of the runtime and development tools.

In addition, Microsoft has also announced a partnership with Novell, which will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called “Moonlight”.

Moonlight will run on all Linux distributions, and support FireFox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers. Moonlight will support both the JavaScript programming model available in Silverlight 1.0, as well as the full .NET programming model we will enable in Silverlight 1.1.

UPDATE: Here’s plenty more information on Moonlight.

This is an exciting day for user experience. If you want help getting started on your first project, or just want to tell me about the cool way you’re using Silverlight, drop me a line!

For all the nitty gritty details about this release, I don’t think I can say it as well as Scott Guthrie, so check out his blog post on this as well.