Ok, if you watch tech news feeds at all, it's pretty much impossible to miss out on the fact that Microsoft today launched the 1.0 version of Silverlight, their multimedia/web application development platform aimed at taking a chunk of the growing web-based applications market.  The 1.0 release provides support for VC-1, WMV video, WMA and MP3 audio, rich graphics, animation and UI functionality. 

To go along with the release of Silverlight 1.0, Microsoft has also put up Expression Encoder 1.0, a tool that lets you encode your media for use in Silverlight applications.  The goal is to make it as painless as possible for Silverlight developers to get up and going with shared media quickly.  The tool is completely free.

Microsoft also announced that they would be partnering with Novell to port Silverlight to Linux, which will extend support to Firefox, Opera and Konqueror on all Linux distributions.

Major League Baseball is the first high-profile adopter of Silverlight technology, using it to power interactive video content on their website.