"The past 21 days have been some of the most intense hacking days that I have ever had and the same goes for my team that worked 12 to 16 hours per day every single day --including weekends-- to implement Silverlight for Linux in record time. We call this effort Moonlight," writes Miguel de Icaza in a recent blog entry. "Needless to say, we believe that Silverlight is a fantastic development platform, and its .NET-based version is incredibly interesting and as Linux/Unix users we wanted to both get access to content produced with it and to use Linux as our developer platform for Silverlight-powered web sites."

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Microsoft Silverlight is a recent entry into the global AJAX sweepstakes. It will be competing with dozens of established AJAX technology providers (most of whom are members of the OpenAJAX Alliance), as well as the Adobe Flex environment, and perhaps new development environments from Sun Microsystems, including the recntly announced JavaFX.

AJAX was recently called "the hottest technology in IT" by Gartner. de Icaza's blog outlines his development efforts, which extend into a number of areas. His recent "Moonlight" posts can be found here. de Icaza is a also Mono developer (a project formerly led by Ximian and now by Novell to create an ECMA-compliant .NET compatible set of tools. Mono runs on LInux as well as a number of other leading operating systems.)