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What is Silverlight?
Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback that characterize Rich Internet Applications(RIA). Silverlight competes with products such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Adobe Shockwave, JavaFX, Curl and the JavaScript programming language. Version 2.0, now in beta-testing, brings additional interactivity features and support for .NET languages and development tools.

Silverlight is a new cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences and Rich Interactive Applications(RIA) for the web. It runs in all popular browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera. The plugin required to run Silverlight is very small in size hence gets installed very quickly.

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.

It is combination of different technolgoies into a single development platform that allows you to select tools and the programming language you want to use. Silverlight integrates seamlessly with your existing Javascript and ASP.NET AJAX code to complement functionality which you have already created.

Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of Ajax. It also competes with Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight.

SilverLight Demo
See the Silverlight in Action at Microsoft’s Website
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

Where Silverlight Fits
As stated in the previous section, Silverlight executes in the client browser.  What does this mean? It means:
Silverlight applications need to be hosted on a web server
Silverlight does NOT need to be hosted in IIS, any web server will do
Silverlight does NOT need ASP.NET on the server
Silverlight applications cannot access databases without an intermediary (like a web service)
Silverlight applications cannot access server-side classes or variables without an intermediary (like a web service)

Silverlight also can run on any major browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari) on any major OS (XP SP2, Vista, OSX, Linux).

Silverlight Versions
The most current version of Silverlight that is in full release is Silverlight 1.  Silverlight 1 is very good at displaying Media (audio and video) but it’s lack of controls and reliance on JavaScript as the only programming language, introduce numerous limitations.  For a first generation plugin though, it isn’t bad at all.

Silverlight 2 is currently in it’s second public beta and is due to be in full release this fall.  It also contains a full commercial “go live” license, which means that you are permitted to use it to build real production, money-making applications with the Beta version.  Silverlight 2 introduces the .NET framework to Silverlight along with the DLR and a rich control set.  The majority of applications being built today are using Silverlight 2.  With all of the advances in Silverlight 2 combined with the go-live license and the short timeframe until the full release, building anything in Silverlight 1 today seems wasteful to me.

Silverlight and WPF
Silverlight is a limited subset of WPF, both of which use XAML as their markup language.  This allows for several things, such as the shortening of the learning curve when moving from one to the other.  It also means that typically, if you develop an application using Silverlight, it can normally be ported to run as a WPF desktop application with minimal effort.  Moving the other direction however, from WPF to Silverlight, can be more troublesome due to the greatly increased .NET framework and control set in WPF.
Silverlight and ASP.NET

Silverlight and ASP.NET
ASP.NET and Silverlight overlap in some of their capabilities, but Silverlight is not a straight replacement for ASP.NET.  Since code written for ASP.NET executes on the server it has access to the entire .NET framework, can use connection strings to access databases and can use any number of third-party or internally generated class libraries.

Even on the client, there are times when you may want to stick with ASP.NET over Silverlight.  If you have parts of your application that are nothing more than data-entry forms, the standard ASP.NET controls are very well suited to that kind of work.

Silverlight and Flash
Everyone has heard talk of Silverlight being Microsoft’s “Flash Killer”.  Personally, I do not think that is the intention or even goal of Microsoft when it comes to Silverlight.  I believe that Microsoft saw a way to add more interactive capabilities to web applications in a way that is friendly to .NET programmers.  I see the emerging RIA space as being plenty large enough for Flash/Flex, Silverlight and even a few others.  Yes, they both do many of the same things and yes, Flash may do some of them better currently.  But give Silverlight some time to mature and you will see much more feature parity between the two.

Silverlight and AJAX
Built into the Silverlight plugin and SDK are numerous features that perform the same functionality as that provided by AJAX, but with the need to write complex JavaScript.  Silverlight has very rich support for reading data of numerous types from web services to RSS feeds to static XML files.  It also has methods to facilitate the deserialization of XML or JSON into strongly types objects for simple manipulation and binding.

Silverlight and SEO
Silverlight applications are delivered to a browser in a text-based markup language called XAML. That’s no big deal for Web users once they land on a site. But search engines, like Google, can scan XAML. They can’t dive into compiled Flash applications. Flash-heavy sites do often wrap their applications in Web code that search engines can crawl, although it’s extra work for developers and designers to do it, and may not yield search results that are as good as they would be if the search engine was indexing the actual application instead of keywords tacked on after the fact. Silverlight applications will be more findable.

Silverlight 3
At the IBC2008 show in Amsterdam (September 12-16, 2008) Microsoft announced that the next major release of Silverlight will feature support for H.264 video and AAC audio decoding.[35]Microsoft also showed a technical preview of H.264 playback in Silverlight at the same show.

It looks like Silverlight is not just solid technology, but that Microsoft has also put together an infrastructure of supporting services offered at can’t-say-no prices. The Web was hardly hurting for innovation up to now, but Silverlight will likely encourage even more of it.

written by Deepak \\ tags: Microsoft, SilverLight