Also in the Silverlight vein, Guthrie said SAP Netweaver will feature Silverlight support. An NBC executive, Perkins Miller, senior vice president of digital media for NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, said the company would use Silverlight for online streaming of events from the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, as it had done with the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
"We're going to be streaming the Olympics fully in HD (high definition)," Miller said.
Expression Web 3 was discussed for building Web sites. It supports ASP.Net and PHP developments and offers capabilities such as secure FTP deployment, better diagnostics, and a feature called SuperPreview, for building applications to work across different browsers. Expression Blend 3, meanwhile, supports file imports from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as a capability called SketchFlow, for prototyping flow and composition of applications.
Microsoft announced Wednesday IIS (Internet Information Services) Media Services for on-demand streaming. "Our goal with IIS Media Services is basically to enable you to deliver the highest-quality video experience on the Web as possible," said Guthrie.
Also, extensions are shipping for IIS 7 such as a database manager, a secure FTP server, and an application-request-routing engine.
Microsoft is shipping ASP.Net MVC (Model View Controller) 1.0, a free product that lets developers build ASP.Net applications using a Model View Controller paradigm. The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 beta is shipping this week, offering a unified list of parts for Microsoft's Web platform stack. Microsoft Web Application Gallery also is being launched. "This is about providing our community with a place to find free Web applications that you can use and download on your servers," said Guthrie.
The company is offering its Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 product for building improved user experiences across e-commerce channels. Microsoft also plans FastCGI support to host PHP applications in its Azure cloud platform, Guthrie said.
"Currently, Azure is still in preview mode. We're on track for commercial release later this year," he said.