Status and Roadmap
| Date | Version |
|---|---|
| 2009-02-11 | Moonlight 1.0 |
| 2009-12-17 | Moonlight 2.0 |
| 2010-02-03 | Moonlight 3.0 Preview 1 |
| 2011-02-15 | Moonlight 4 Preview 1 |
In an interview in the beginning of June 2007, Miguel de Icaza said that the Mono team expected to offer a feasibility "alpha" demo in mid-June 2007, with support for Mozilla Firefox on Linux by the end of the year.
After a 21-day hacking spree by the Mono team (including Chris Toshok, Larry Ewing and Jeffrey Stedfast among others), a public demo was shown at Microsoft ReMIX conference in Paris, France on June 21, 2007.
However, in September 2007, developers still needed to install and compile a lot of Mono and Olive (the experimental Mono subproject for .NET 3.0 support) modules from the Mono SVN repository to be able to test Moonlight. A Moonlight IDE, named Lunar Eclipse, exists in SVN for XAML designs. It is expected to be included or ported into MonoDevelop as an add-on in the future. Moonlight uses Cairo for rendering.
Moonlight was provided as a plugin for Firefox and Chrome on popular Linux distributions. The plugin itself does not include a media codec pack, but when the Moonlight plugin detects playable media it refers users to download a free Media codec pack from Microsoft.
Moonlight 2.0 tracked the Silverlight 2.0 implementation. The first completed version, Moonlight 1.0, supporting Silverlight 1.0, was released 20 January 2009. Moonlight 2.0 was released on December 17, 2009. The Moonlight 2.0 release also contained some features of Silverlight 3 including a pluggable media framework which allowed Moonlight to work with pluggable open codecs, such as Theora and Dirac.
Preview releases of Moonlight 4.0, targeting Silverlight 4 compatibility, were released in early 2011.
In April 2011, the Moonlight team demonstrated Moonlight running on Android tablets and phones at the MIX11 Web Developers conference in Las Vegas.
Shortly after the April 2011 release, Attachmate, parent to developer Mono, laid off an undisclosed number of Mono employees and announced a deal with startup Xamarin. At that time, Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman affirmed their commitment to the Moonlight project; however, there have been no outward signs of any further development since the new partnership. Their published road map is quite out of date and the previously active release schedule (including nightly builds) has completely ceased since the new partnership was formed.
In December 2011 Miguel de Icaza announced that work on Moonlight had stopped with no future plans. He explained that, although there was always some bloat, complication and over-engineering in the Silverlight vision, Microsoft had "cut the air supply" to it by omitting cross-platform components, making it a web-only plugin, and including Windows-only features. He advised developers to separate user interface code from the rest of their application development to ensure "a great UI experience on every platform (Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows and Web)" without being dependent on third party APIs.
Read more about this topic: Moonlight (runtime)
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