Microsoft Silverlight

                           Microsoft Silverlight is a web browser plugin that provides support for rich internet applications such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback. Silverlight competes with products such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Adobe Shockwave, JavaFX, and Apple QuickTime. Now in beta-testing, version 2.0 brings improved interactivity and support for .NET languages and development tools. Silverlight was developed under the codename Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E). It is compatible with multiple web browser products used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Mobile devices, starting with Windows Mobile 6 and Symbian (Series 60) phones, will also be supported.

A third-party free software implementation named Moonlight is under development to
bring compatible functionality to GNU/Linux.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). Silverlight can also be used to create Windows Sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista. Silverlight supports playback of WMV, WMA and MP3 media content across all supported browsers without requiring Windows
Media Player, the Windows Media Player ActiveX control or Windows Media browser plugins. Because Windows Media Video 9 is an implementation of the SMPTE VC-1 standard, Silverlight also supports VC-1 video, though still only in an ASF file format. Furthermore, the
Software license agreement says VC-1 is only licensed for the "personal and non-commercial use of a consumer". Silverlight does not support playback of H.264 video. Silverlight makes it possible to dynamically load XML content that can be manipulated through a DOM interface, a
technique that is consistent with conventional Ajax techniques. Silverlight exposes a Downloader object which can be used to download content, like scripts, media assets or other data, as may be required by the application. With version 2.0, the programming logic can be written in any .NET language, including some common dynamic programming languages like Ruby and Python.

A Silverlight application being edited in Microsoft Visual Studio.Silverlight applications can be written in any .NET programming language. As such, any development tools which can be used with .NET languages can work with Silverlight, provided they can target the Silverlight CoreCLR for hosting the application, instead of the .NET Framework CLR. Microsoft has positioned Microsoft Expression Blend versions 2.0 and 2.5 for designing the UI of Silverlight 1.0 and 2
applications respectively. Visual Studio 2008 can be used to develop and debug Silverlight applications. To create Silverlight projects and let the compiler target CoreCLR, Visual Studio 2008 requires the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio which is available as a beta release

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