fluxcapacity

I came across the announcement that Mono 1.2.6 is finished and available.  From what I can tell, the new release essentially brings Mono up to par with the .NET 3.5 enhancements (like LINQ).  There was also a brief mention of Moonlight support.

Earlier this year there was buzz when Moonlight -- an open source implementation of Silverlight 1.0 -- had been written by the Mono team in just 21 days.  21 days?!  I'm not sure how they did that, but they must have burned the moonlight oil.  Anyway, if they could pull that off in 21 days, I wondered that amazing feats had been accomplished in the intervening six whole months.  So today, I spent a few hours installing the Moonlight Firefox plugin on Ubuntu in order to answer that question.

It turns out that installing Moonlight isn't exactly a cakewalk.  It's a lot easier than some Linux horror stories (like, say, installing obscure drivers) but the process had far too many steps.  At a high level, the steps are like this:

1. The quick part: download+compile mono & libgdiplus.
2. The longer part: add a handful of auxilliary packages and sources needed by moonlight.
3. The anticipation rises: download+compile moonlight itself.
4. The happy ending: copy the freshly compiled Firefox plugin into the Mozilla/plugins folder.

 Once finished, there are three basic steps:

1. Cross your fingers.
2. Load up Firefox and navigate to your Silverlight-enabled webpage.
3. Don't cry.  Remeber, it's an alpha beta.

Even if you did step 1, odds are, it won't be a pretty sight.  For instance, check out Fluxify on Linux:

 (Hey, at least it didn't crash.)  I tried a handful of other sites, and it was hit or miss -- usually miss.  Most were broken in one way or another, and they all crawled along on my relatively slow 1.5 GHz Pentium M laptop. 

The status of Silverlight on Linux

It's very cool that the Mono team is working hard to complete the cross-platform picture for Silverlight.  If you're developing for Silverlight 1.0, you should definitely get your hands on Moonlight right away.  A 1.0-only plugin can be built without dependencies on normal Mono, so you should be able to forego much of the pain.  Unfortunately, the 2.0 ( recently renamed from Silverlight 1.1 alpha ) support just isn't yet worth the installation effort, given that your application will most likely be broken.  However, if you're like me and just can't resist the allure of the creative title, and you enjoy being frustrated, you should definitely give it a try right away.