Redmond (WA) - Microsoft announced Silverlight 2 with the promise of "new rich Internet applications development and streaming media features," along with support for Windows, Mac and Linux tools developing Silverlight applications. The original Silverlight was launched just over a year ago.

Silverlight, according to Microsoft, has seen penetration in some countries up to 50%. This probably has a lot to do with the recent Olympics and footage being shown on NBCOlympics.com, powered by Silverlight. Numbers from that period reveal it having more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched.

A variety of features are available in Silverlight 2. These include .NET Framework support as a compatible subset, more built-in controls, better skinning and templating support, deep zoom, more enhanced networking support (REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and standard HTTP services), expanded .NET Framework language support and DRM. Microsoft also plans "to support additional tools for developing Silverlight applications by providing funding to Soyatec, a France-based IT solutions provider and Eclipse Foundation member, to lead a project to integrate advanced Silverlight development capabilities into the Eclipse IDE.

Soyatec plans to release the project under the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0 on SourceForge and submit it to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project."

Microsoft also announced the Silverlight Control Pack and the technical specification for the Silverlight Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) vocabulary.