Microsoft has released the latest version of its Silverlight web application tool, promising a "radical improvement" in the way developers and designers build applications on the web.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .Net developer division, said in the announcement on Monday: "This release will further accelerate our efforts to make Silverlight, Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Studio the preeminent solutions for the creation and delivery of media and rich internet application experiences."

Silverlight 2.0 is the first version of the platform to fully support Microsoft's .Net developer framework, allowing developers to write code in several different programming languages.

The new version will also include new features for Silverlight applications, such as a calendar function and the ability to zoom on images.

The Silverlight software will be supported on the latest versions of the Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer browsers for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Microsoft hopes that the updated version of Silverlight will increase the platform's reach within the consumer market.

The company estimates that Silverlight has reached up to 25 per cent of the consumer market in just over a year, but it still lags far behind competing technologies such as Flash and Java, which are already installed on virtually every browser-enabled computer.