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After last Friday's announcement, I'm just getting around to reading about the Silverlight 3 release. One of the first pages I visited was the Overview page, where it states, near the top of the page:

Currently there are two runtimes available for users to experience Silverlight content.

Windows Runtime - Mac Runtime

Both runtimes support rich media capabilities and enable fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality audio and video to all major browsers including Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer running on the Mac or on Windows. The designer experience remains largely the same for both runtimes as well. The main difference resides in the developer experience.

Does anyone know what this is referring to? Is there some difference for Silverlight developers between the two runtimes?

+1  A: 

For one thing, the different run times will have different debug and error information. This will be important for developers.

Joseph
+1  A: 

I can't imagine what that statement refers to - the development I've done in Silverlight 2 and 3 works equally well on a Mac and a PC. There are no notes in the Silverlight documentation referring to a specific platform.

Maybe they're referring to the difference in tool sets - you can create SL apps on a Mac using Eclipse but that's a different experience than using VS on a PC. Of course if I found a bug in the Mac runtime plugin I'd be pretty much hosed, I have no idea how I'd troubleshoot other than to throw it over the wall to MS.

James Cadd
Good point regarding developing Silverlight on the Mac. It never occurred to me that anyone is doing that. They seem to be referring to the runtime specifically though. It's bizarre that they put this at the top of the Silverlight overview page.
Traples
I viewed the link and the statement is even more striking on the actual page. Maybe a post to the silverlight.net forums is in order there.
James Cadd
You're right. I put a question on the Silverlight forums.
Traples

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