Seesmic launches Desktop built with Silverlight and MEF

Seesmic have released the final version of Seesmic Desktop 2, their Silverlight-based Mac and PC compatible “social media client”.

The main differentiating feature of Seesmic Desktop is that it allows developers to build plugins, made possible with the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF), which can then be distributed through the Seesmic Plugin Marketplace. This has meant that there are over 40 plugins available at launch, for connecting to all manner of social networks and services.

“We wanted to build a truly open social platform application so that anyone can build its service into Seesmic Desktop” said Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur speaking exclusively to DeveloperFusion on the decision to use Silverlight for Seesmic Desktop 2. “We discussed with Adobe as Seesmic Desktop was previously on Air and concluded Adobe Air would not allow us to build such a platform in a secure way.”

When asked about the development experience with Silverlight, Loic only had praise for the platform. “Our development team is very happy about it and the result and performance we are getting. We had awesome support from Microsoft and permanent contact with the Silverlight team to achieve today's launch. I like that finding developers isn't as difficult as some other platforms, there are hundreds of thousands of developers on .NET.”

Of course, Silverlight is also going to be used on the upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform. “Our development efforts also helped us create Seesmic for Windows Phone 7 which will be launched later today on the same code base which is a real plus” said LeMeur.

“We would have never been able to create a cross platform and open application without Silverlight.”

For more on building plugins for Seesmic, check out the Seesmic Platform pages.

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