The future of Moonlight

With Moonlight quickly approaching its first official 2.0 release (which has feature parity with Silverlight 2.0 and has a handful of 3.0 features in place) we have been thinking about the work ahead of us, 3.0 and beyond.

Although there is much work left to do to achieve full parity with Silverlight 3.0, a solid 2.0 core means that we can start thinking about new innovative ideas.

Here are some ideas of things that Moonlight could prototype:

• Video camera and audio support (Chris has a working prototype).
• Native menu support for out-of-browser: we feel strongly that out-of-browser apps should get native menus and not be done with XAML. To allow proper MacOS, Windows and Linux integration.
• Right-click support for taking screenshots of Moonlight apps, record a screencast of a video, support for saving individual images, XAML and video from the plugin.
• Print the current canvas.
• User opt-in for full network access and full file system access (This is possible with Moonlight if compiled for the desktop APIs, but perhaps we should extend this to the browser version).
• Make the "Moonlight" widget ubiquitous. Allow any existing Gtk+, Win32, OSX, iPhone and Android to create content from a XAML file:

  		var splash = Moonlight.LoadFrom ("splash.xaml");
  		container.Add (sphash);
  		[...]
  
  		var mainMenu = Moonlight.LoadFrom ("mainMenu.xaml");
  		mainMenu.FindObject ("Start").Clicked += {
  			StartGame ();
  		};
  		window.Add (mainMenu);
  		

We could use Silverlight to build the next wave of cross-platform desktop applications.

I think of the Moonlight relationship to Silverlight as the Firefox relationship to IE four years ago. It is a chance to try out new ideas in the Silverlight-o-sphere, we can try those ideas out, and if the ideas have merit, they could become part of the official Silverlight.

This echoes to some extent what Bob Muglia said on an interview a few days ago: "[it] will allow for Silverlight to move into all sorts of places where we can't - we can't see."

For example, we are hard at work to make Silverlight run on the native PlayStation 3 and the Wii.

In any case, we have been working on Moonlight for a long time. With our security system in place, and both our smooth streaming media engine and GUI engine in place I feel that open source innovation can begin.