If you’re going to win in the smartphone game, you’ve got to get the developers on board. That’s a lesson that Apple, Google and RIM all know, and Microsoft gets the message, too.
At its MIX10 developer conference, Microsoft talked up the forthcoming Silverlight 4, which the company is offering as a near-final release candidate, one month ahead of the final launch. CodeGuru has the story.
LAS VEGAS — Microsoft executives took turns extolling the virtues of Silverlight 4, the soon-to-be-released and now open source Microsoft update of its multimedia Web development platform, during the opening keynote address here at Microsoft’s MIX10 developer conference.
The goal was to dazzle would-be Windows Phone customers and simultaneously light a fire under the thousands of Silverlight developers looking to write new apps for Microsoft’s smartphone offerings.
In an increasingly competitive and cut-throat smartphone market dominated by Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry and the certain emergence of Google’s Android OS-based devices, Microsoft is taking its best crack with developer tools and applications designed to engage users and help them organize the applications and smartphone features they need and want in the most intuitive and entertaining way possible.
“The first version of Silverlight shipped two years ago,” Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s .NET developer platform, said. “Today, almost 60 percent of all connected Internet devices have installed Silverlight and that deployment rate is accelerating rapidly.”
