This week saw some big announcements for Silverlight at PDC, SlideRocket opened for business, Netflix streams with Silverlight, MTV opened its collection of music videos through the Flash Player, and a new Expression Encoder is released. All this and more on the on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

FEATURED: Silverlight Tools Released at PDC

Microsoft had several major announcements at the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) this week in Los Angeles. While several announcements centered around Windows and the cloud, Silverlight also had its share of announcements.

One of the big announcements, was the announcement of the Silverlight Toolkit (formerly the Silverlight Control Pack). This includes several new controls including several charting controls. The source code is also available for the Silverlight Toolkit, and it is released under the Ms-PL license.

Tim Heuer (Microsoft): Silverlight Tools RTW

Scott Barnes (Microsoft): Silverlight Toolkit Released

Jesse Liberty (Microsoft): Toolkit Release and Themes

MTV Music Launches

This week MTV released most all of the videos in its collection on its new site, MTVMusic.com. This site uses the Flash Player to deliver the thousands of music videos to the user. In addition, MTV is making this content available through an API that is open to developers.

MTV Music

MTVMusic.com API

ColdFusion Jedi: MTV Music (Yes, It has an API)

SlideRocket Open

We have covered SlideRocket previously here on InsideRIA (here), and as of this week it is now open to the public. In addition to it being open, SlideRocket now has an actual business model. There are now three different account types: free, individual, and business. The individual and business accounts types include additional features such as an offline player, collaboration, and web meetings. The individual and business account types are $10 and $20 month respectively.

In addition to the new features, SlideRocket now includes options for email and phone support.

Universal Desktop: SlideRocket opens up to the public

SlideRocket

ZendAMF Tutorial

Lee Brimelow, Technical Evangelist at Adobe, published a tutorial on the new AMF integration with the Zend Framework for PHP. This tutorial gives PHP developers all of the needed information to communicate with Flash or Flex applications using AMF (Action Message Format), the open binary data transfer specification released by Adobe earlier this year.

Lee Brimelow (Adobe): New video tutorial on using ZendAMF

ZendAMF Video Tutorial

New Expression Encoder Released

Tim Heuer announced that the Expression Encoder SP1 has been released. This release includes the recently announced H.264 support as well as the support for smooth streaming in IIS7. Silverlight developers will also be interested in the new output templates for Silverlight 2.

Tim Heuer (Microsoft): Expression Encoder SP1 now Available

Netflix Using Silverlight

Netflix's Watch Instantly functionality will now be powered by Silverlight 2. This opens up the functionality beyond the previous Windows-only player. The Netflix Press Release states:

Silverlight with Play Ready offers a powerful and secure toolkit for delivery of dynamic streaming, which offers faster start-up, and higher quality video, adapted in real time to users' connection speeds," said Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt. "Members who enjoy watching movies and TV episodes from the growing library of choices that can be instantly streamed at Netflix will be thrilled with this next generation improvement of access and quality, on a broader range of platforms, including Intel Macs and Firefox.

This is certainly a welcome move for Mac Netflix customers.

Engadget: Netflix finally brings 'Watch Instantly' to Macs via Silverlight

Netflix

OpenLaszlo 4.2 Beta 2

OpenLaszlo 4.2 is progressing to a final release version. The latest beta includes a large collection of updates. Among these updates are significant improvements in the audio and video support for SWF9 as well as improvements in profiling and debugging.

OpenLaszlo Blog: OpenLaszlo Preview release 4.2beta2 is now available

JavaFX Progressing to 1.0

James Weaver covered some of the changes in the progressing JavaFX platform. While the platform is moving toward the final 1.0 release, there are some small changes that JavaFX developers should be familiar with. James covers all of these changes in his post:

James Weaver: Getting Ready for the Imminent JavaFX SDK 1.0 Release

Read more from David Tucker.