Moonlight 4 Preview Now Available

WALTHAM, Mass., Feb. 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The Mono® Project, an open-source initiative sponsored by Novell, today announced the preview availability of Moonlight™ 4, an open source Linux* implementation of Microsoft* Silverlight*. Having delivered Moonlight with full support for all prior version of Silverlight and preview support for Silverlight 4, including support of Microsoft-licensed codecs for Silverlight 3 and 4, today's announcement marks the first time that Moonlight has shipped a release consistent with many popular sites built for the latest release of Silverlight. This release gives Firefox* and Google Chrome* users on Linux access to the latest Silverlight content and enables developers to take advantage of the newest features of Silverlight on all platforms.

"We are always working to provide solutions that software development teams need to be productive and deliver applications quickly and cost effectively," said Nikolay Atanasov, RadControls for Silverlight Product Manager at Telerik. "With the availability of the Moonlight 4 beta, and its compatibility with Telerik RadControls for Silverlight, developers now have even greater flexibility to rapidly develop applications for Silverlight, while being able to build and deliver their applications on time and in budget."

Developers can also leverage the Silverlight 3 APIs and numerous Silverlight 4 APIs, including support for the H.264 video codec, hardware acceleration of graphics rendering using the GPU, 3-D transformation and pixel shaders. It also extends web browser support to Google Chrome and contains numerous performance and memory management improvements. In addition, users can run Silverlight applications as desktop applications on Linux in both "sand-boxed" and full-trust modes using Moonlight's unique mopen.

"The latest release of Moonlight is another important step forward in creating a compatible open source implementation of Silverlight," said Brad Becker, director of product management at Microsoft Corporation. "By enabling support for Linux, Moonlight 4 gives Silverlight developers the tools they need to develop for the platforms they want to."

Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and Developer Platform vice president at Novell, said, "Our team has worked tirelessly to get Moonlight to version parity with Silverlight 3 – finally bringing the latest development and delivery capabilities for visually-rich applications to Linux. Now that we've reached this milestone, we are looking to complete the 4.0 APIs."

To download the Moonlight 4 beta or learn more about the project, visit http://go-mono.com/moonlight. For more information about open source projects that Novell sponsors and contributes to, visit http://www.novell.com/linux/opensource.

Moonlight is part of a technical collaboration announced by Novell and Microsoft in September of 2007. Microsoft has provided Novell with access to its test suites and specifications for Silverlight, and provides Novell end users of Moonlight with free access to the Microsoft Media Pack, a set of licensed media codecs for video and audio.

About the Mono Project

The Mono Project is an open source initiative sponsored by Novell to develop a UNIX* version of the Microsoft .NET development framework. Hosted at www.mono-project.com, the Mono project provides all the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris*, Mac* OS X*, Windows and Unix. Mono has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL), a leader in intelligent     workload     management, helps organizations securely deliver and manage computing services across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. We help customers reduce the cost, complexity, and risk associated with their IT systems through our solutions for identity and security, systems management, collaboration and Linux-based operating platforms. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit www.novell.com.

Novell, the Novell logo, the N logo, and Mono are registered trademarks and Moonlight is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. (openSUSE, SUSE, and Banshee do not need to appear in the credit statement, as they were not used in the body of the press release). *All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Novell, Inc.