Silverlight Sneaks into Android

Novell Puts Silverlight into Android

Open source Silverlight replacement previewed on mobile OS

By Paul Krill | InfoWorld | Published: 09:20, 20 April 11

Novell is porting Moonlight, an open source version of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application plugin software, to Google's Android mobile platform, a Novell official acknowledged on Tuesday afternoon.

A preliminary version of the Android port was previewed last week at the Microsoft Mix11 conference, said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of the Novell developer platform. He has been in charge of the Mono open source project linking Microsoft software development technologies to other platforms. "[The Android port] is the first public preview and it is not yet a product."

Moonlight initially was built for Linux and Unix systems as a mechanism for running Silverlight applications. It is making its way to handheld devices. Novell has shown vector graphic demonstrations of Moonlight running on both a Motorola Xoom tablet and a Google Nexus S phones. Both devices use Android
.