Microsoft is quietly preparing to ship the first ‘release candidate,’ or RC, of the initial version of its Silverlight cross-platform media player technology, perhaps as early as the end of July.

However, getting it into users’ hands and onto their computers is just the first step – third-party developers will need to write compelling applications to make Silverlight ultimately successful. And a full-scale developers’ release is still a ways off.

The announcement of the upcoming RC testing phase – the last test step before commercial release — came via a blog post by Tim Sneath, a Microsoft client platform technical evangelist.

Full story: internetnews.com