exclusive: Silverlight 1.0 getting official this week

At today's Houston TechFest, Microsoft's Brad Abrams was the keynote speaker and he delivered what has become (more or less) the standard Silverlight overview presentation. He showed off Silverlight applications running on his Mac PowerBook and showed off the incredible new media capabilities that Silverlight is aiming to provide in the near future. If you've seen a Microsoft delivered overview on Silverlight before, then you pretty much know what was covered in this keynote (the Airlines demo, the chess demo, etc.).

But the one question on everyone's mind is when will all of this Silverlight stuff officially be released (you do remember that even Silverlight 1.0 has yet to be released, don't you?). While Brad claimed that the "people" at Microsoft would not let him provide exact dates, he did provide a juicy clue that indicates Silverlight 1.0 will be officially released within the next week. As Brad put it today, "Silverlight 1.0 will be released before the milk in you refrigerator goes bad." I don't know about the milk you buy, but milk that's in my frig now will probably expire in about a week, maybe two.

Brad seemed very eager to share (dang corporate shackles), so I'd be inclined to think his "hint" meant we'll see the official release of Silverlight 1.0 this week. "So what?" you say. As Brad put it again, the official release of Silverlight 1.0 marks the beginning of the Silverlight adoption clock. Partners that have "real" applications built on Silverlight- like MLB and Fox- will begin to turn on their new Silverlight services with the official release and we'll finally start seeing adoption of the Silverlight plug-in outside of the group of early-adopters (a.k.a. Microsoft developers)- a critical step in the evolution of Silverlight if it is to compete with Flash's 98% global adoption.

So there you have it. Silverlight 1.0 will (most likely) be officially released this week and you heard it here first.