One criticism we get as a company is that on the day Silverlight 1.0 was launched we didn’t do a massive refactoring of all Microsoft media-based or media-containing sites to use Silverlight. Since dry humor doesn’t often translate via blog I’m poking some fun at our critics with that statement. Any technology transition takes time, even one we believe strongly in like Silverlight. Given skill sets, market requirements and different time-frames it was never that surprising that the previous Zune.net still used Flash. It just made sense at the time.

Today is a different story though, today we can count one more site as having come into the Silverlight fold, Zune.net. If you visit my Zune profile and do the right-click dance you’ll see the lovely “Silverlight” popup (circled in red below).

In fact Silverlight is used twice on the page, first as the portion that shows recent plays, badges and the artists a member is following as well as the media player on the bottom of the page.

That little player is pretty nice for playing 30-second previews but it’s even better when paired with a Zune Pass. If you’re logged in and you have a Zune Pass then you can stream the full length track of anything in the Zune catalog. You don’t even need the Zune client software installed to listen to full albums. To give iTunes a friendly little dig you have install the software just to search their catalog.

Two great tastes together at last Zune and Silverlight.