Recently Microsoft released version 1.0 of it’s “cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web”, called Silverlight. Last week I had a sneak peek at the software and I was presently surprised to see that Microsoft is also developing a Linux version of the plug-in with the help of Novell, codenamed Moonlight.

As such Silverlight is just a plug-in that can deliver interactive .NET content on to your web-pages. It is particularly interesting to see where this leads to with regards to game development. Silverlight is almost certainly a challenger to Flash’s monopoly on web-based games. It offers a flexible programming model that supports javascript, .NET, and other languages, so it will particularly hit a cord with programmers that already know these languages.

Are we going to see more Silverlight based games? I am sure we will. .NET applications are very easy to build now that there are great environments like the Visual Studio, Visual Studio Express and #develop. It just means people are naturally going to build games that run on Silverlight. This software is clearly something to watch out for if you develop web-based games. I hope Microsoft offers graphics hardware acceleration in some form on the Silverlight platform. That will just be amazing.