How Is Silverlight Really Doing?

Silverlight  1.0 was released about a year ago now, maybe a good time to do a reality check! About a year ago their were 0 installs of Silverlight out there.  Today, there are nearly 1.5 Million Downloads a day of Silverlight.  Most of the applications and web sites that use Silverlight at this point are heavy duty video sites, as Silverlight 1.0 was mainly a streaming video application.  With the Release of Silverlight 2.0

Below are some of the most impressive Silverlight implementations out there.

Top 10 Silverlight Implementations

Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia
Browse through thousands of pieces of Rock-n-Roll memorabilia in the Hard Rock collection!  Hard Rock just launched the Hard Rock Memorabilia site using Silverlight 2 “Deep Zoom” technology, allowing you to zoom in seamlessly and see incredible detail like fingerprints and photographer’s reflections on the pieces in the collection.

NBC Beijing Olympics
22 sports for 2,200 hours of live streaming video.  That’s a ton of video! Not only that, but you are going to have a ton of interactive data wrapped around what you are watching.  The NBC Olympics demo was a highlight of the MIX08 keynote; an incredible media-viewing experience built in Silverlight.  Here is the footage from the keynote.  You can also see an interview with Perkins Miller talking about their solution here. This will be the “coming out” party for Silverlight.

Microsoft Videos
Microsoft Videos is your central location for viewing rich media from Microsoft. Scan our Quick Picks for the latest videos, enter a search, or choose from our Video Categories. Then tell us what you think by rating what you’ve watched. If you like what you see, share it with a friend or colleague, or link to it in your blog using one of our community features.

WWE / ECW X-Stream
WWE.com will use the Silverlight technology as the primary video display and interactive experience. Currently, WWE.com offers more than 14,000 individual video clips, including original online shows, highlights from weekly WWE programming and classic moments in WWE’s long and legendary history.

Microsoft Health Common User Interface
The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) provides User Interface Design Guidance and Toolkit controls that address a wide range of patient safety concerns for healthcare organizations worldwide, allowing a new generation of safer, more usable and compelling health applications to be quickly and easily created.

Torque TV
A digital television network for viewers who want broadcast quality automotive programs wherever and whenever they want to watch, and for advertisers who want a more targeted, more measurable way to reach customers.

Microsoft Popfly
Allows user to create web pages, program snippets, and mashups using the Microsoft Silverlight rich Internet applications runtime and the set of online tools provided. Popfly is currently in Beta stage of development.

Wish43
Presents a new kind of graphical user interface for 43 Things.  It displays user profile icons and goals shared by those users.  The goals with more users who’ve listed them as their goals appear larger.  If you ever wanted to know what the collective Internet’s dreams and desires were at any given time, this is a rather random way of taking a peak.

RobotChamps
While there has long been a large audience interested in robotics, there have also been a number of barriers to entry, both real and perceived. Robots are not widely available in traditional retail stores. If one could find a programmable robot, the cost was often times non-trivial.  RoboChamps is more specifically built on top of the simulation functionality provided in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008, which means that participants can program their robots using the .NET languages they are already familiar with.

Microsoft Live@edu
Looking for innovative solutions for keeping your students connected? Learn about Live@edu, Microsoft’s newest platform for delivering student and alumni email, communication and collaboration services.

If you have Adobe Flash player installed like most people on the Internet, make sure you check your flash version and ensure you are running version 9.0.124.0.  If you are running a lower version, your machine is susceptible to sending pretty much anything to the hacked flash applet, and server.  Updated your Flash now!  That or uninstall it!  How many of these rouge flash files are out there?  About 250, 000 Web pages.  That’s at least how many have been tracked to take advantage of the exploit.  There probably are way more.  To be clear, these machines have not been exploited using the bug in flash, they however hosted the malicious flash files that would take users private information from their computers.

The worst part about this exploit?  You won’t know you have gone to a bad site!  What the flash file will do is install a Trojan on your machine, and send the server passwords, and possibly other data, including WoW (World of Warcraft) account information.  Another awesome part of this?  Since Adobe Flash is cross-platform, cross-browser, there are a ton of computers out there that are open to a massive attack.

While Adobe has now fixed the issue (they are pretty sure anyway), most people won’t get the patch until they run into a site that forces them to install the latest version.  If you would like to learn how to create a malicious flash file, just read Mark Dowd’s article from IBM.  The other issue is that most times things like this happen, it seems people find workarounds to the fix.  Symantec is actually recommending people uninstall Flash until Adobe sorts this all out.  And lastly, Adobe has no built-in method in flash to warn users they need critical updates, so millions of computers will probably not get this patch for a long time.

Anyway if you are interested in blocking Flash in Firefox, it’s easy to do with Flashblock.  In Internet Explorer it’s pretty easy as well, just use the Tools-Manage Add-Ons dialog, select Shockwave Flash Object and then the Disable radio button.

Maybe now is a good time to try out Silverlight?  And once you install it, check out the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia collection!  It uses some awesome Deep Zoom technology built into Silverlight.

Update:  I’m honored that an adobe employee found the time to comment on the inaccuracy of the posting.  Unfortunately, its very accurate, and his statement are inaccurate.  Adobe actually did patch the wide spread exploit in April, however, as I mentioned, Mark Dowd found a way around the patch, and published his findings in this PDF document.  This is what the Chinese attackers used.

Also, it does install a Trojan on the machine.  A Trojan is “is a piece of software which appears to perform a certain action but in fact performs another”.  A Flash file is downloaded onto the users machine before being run, and runs inside the flash runtime.  Theirfore, yes indeed one could call this a Trojan.  You can read the articles over the net.  Here is one explaining the Wow.UB Trojan (The official classification).

Also, its World of Warcraft, not World of Warfare. And lastly, I love flash by the way!  No plugin or browser for that matter has ever had the success the flash player has had!  Very impressive! However, there is an issue with the older players now, and people should just make sure they have the latest patch, that is all.

If you are curious what sites had the trojan flash files, you can check on shadowserver.