It's reporting right from at the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, where the Redmond, Washington based software maker, Microsoft released the first beta of its potential Flash-killer, Silverlight 3, on Wednesday.

Scheduled from March 18 to March 20, the MIX09 conference was kicked off by Bill Buxton, a Canadian computer scientist and designer, presently a lead researcher at Microsoft Research, with an upbeat keynote for designers and developers. Later, Scott Guthrie, the corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft, came up on the stage to make a number of significant announcements, including the big one - Silverlight 3 beta.

The Silverlight 3 beta was rolled out with 50 new features including the feature that makes it capable of running applications outside of a browser and more high-def video features. The Silverlight 3 beta features the new graphics, animation and 3-D features, and over 60 controls to help developers to create rich internet applications (RIAs). The advancements and improvements that Microsoft has made in the Silverlight 3 beta surprised Dave Meeker, user experience strategy lead at Roundarch, a Chicago-based Web development firm, which makes extensive use of Silverlight and Flash.

According to Meeker, the first beta of Silverlight 3 offers support for Silverlight applications running outside the browser, and developers can now use threads within Silverlight apps to enhance performance and step-up application responsiveness, a capability that isn't yet supported in Flash.

For high-def video, the Silverlight 3 beta has addition of native MPEG-4-based H. 264, Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline. According to the company this is "true HD," but some would argue that only 1080p fits that designation.

The Silverlight 3 beta can detect changes in Internet speeds and adjust video quality for smooth playback during live streaming. It can also take advantage of graphics hardware acceleration for full-screen HD playback. The Silverlight 3 beta can help developers with new visual effects like 3D animation, 3D perspective, pixel shader effects, bitmap caching, app themes, control skinning, and improved font rendering. The beta addresses the

In the Silverlight 3 beta, the "problem with plugins" is addressed by mirroring content to HTML that's easily crawled by search engines. It offers support for deep linking that allows users to bookmark a database driven page. It has an amplified Deep Zoom feature that helps users to navigate through image collections by zooming. It has a key for Netflic, the player's built-in support for content protection, which can be PlayReady, AES, or Windows Media DRM. According to Guthrie, the Silverlight plugin/runtime installs in just 8 seconds, and version 3 is actually 40K smaller in size than version 2.

Meeker said, "Silverlight has not only made up ground on Flash, it's also moving into the world of Adobe AIR. Now that Microsoft is looking at building these kinds of applications, you don't need to be a hardcore programmer." According to Meeker, "the Silverlight 3 beta includes several new 3-D effects that previously required "a lot of heavy lifting" from developers, and Silverlight 3 is on track to natively support H. 264 video". He added, "We already knew Silverlight was good with video, but this is another significant push forward."

Silverlight, a programmable web browser plugin, enables features, like animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback that characterize rich Internet applications. The Silverlight version 2.0, which fetched additional interactivity features and support for .NET languages and development tools, was released in October 2008. The Silverlight 3 was announced at the IBC2008 show in Amsterdam (September 12-16, 2008).

On the first day of MIX, Microsoft also released a preview of the company's Expression Blend 3 web design and development tool, Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta, the Windows Web Application Gallery, and Microsoft Commerce Server 2009. The software giant Microsoft also announced the updates to its cloud computing platform -Azure.