OVERVIEW OF SILVERLIGHT

MICROSOFT SILVERLIGHT

• Silverlight was formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere.


• It is a fast and a strong competitor to Adobe Flash.


• It is a cross-browser, cross platform plug-in, a light-weight subset of XAML, which supports Ajax, Python, Ruby, etc., and helps develop Rich Internet Applications (RIA) , and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser.

Features:
Cross-platform: Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby).

Cross-browser: It runs on all major browsers(IE, FireFox, Safari, etc).

• Silverlight 2 does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer in order to run.
• Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support that enables great developer / designer workflow and integration when building Silverlight applications.
• Silverlight enables the display of high-definition video files.
• Silverlight framework allows the developer to create impressive animation effects in less time.

Some of the important features:

WPF UI Framework: Silverlight 2 includes a rich WPF-based UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. It includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning.

Rich Controls: Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications.

Rich Networking Support: Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services.

Rich Base Class Library: Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc).