Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.
Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system, similar to WPF and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime. It is being designed to work in concert with XAML and is scriptable with JavaScript. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations. Textual content created with Silverlight would be more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML).
Microsoft Silverlight is a web-based subset of WPF. During development it was named WPF/E, which stood for "Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere". The Silverlight subset enables Flash-like web and mobile applications with the same code as Windows .NET applications. 3D features are not supported, but XPS and vector-based drawing are included.
Languages Support
With version 2.0, the programming logic can be written in any .NET language, including some common dynamic programming languages like Ruby and Python.
Features
Silverlight ships with a lightweight class library which features, among others, extensible controls, XML Web Services, networking components and LINQ APIs. This class library is a subset of and is considerably smaller than .NET Framework's Base Class Library. Silverlight code runs in a sandbox which prevents invoking platform APIs.[19] Silverlight 2.0 also adds support for DRM in media files.[14]
Silverlight also includes classes for data access over XML-based Web services (POX), REST and WCF Services. The networking support in Silverlight can be used by Silverlight applications to communicate over HTTP.
IDE
Microsoft has positioned Expression Blend 2.0 (effectively an interactive, WYSIWYG front-end for designing XAML-based interfaces for WPF and Silverlight) for designing the UI of Silverlight applications. Visual Studio 2008 can be used to develop and debug Silverlight applications. However, Visual Studio 2008 requires the Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight (currently an alpha release) to create Silverlight projects, and let the compiler target Silverlight CoreCLR.
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