Microsoft Silverlight: Light Up the Web

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Microsoft Silverlight is a new plug-in for next generation media experiences and interactive web applications. It integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime providing a rich user-experience.

Silverlight intends to compete with Adobe Flash offering a plethora of Rich Media Applications Tools for its .NET developer community. Silverlight applications are not language specific and can be programmed using AJAX, C#, VB, Python, Ruby and many others. It can be easily integrated with existing web-applications.

Silverlight SDK is available for the developers and can be downloaded from the Silverlight website. Silverlight media interfaces can be designed using Microsoft Expression Studio, which incorporates some great designing tools. The forthcoming version of Visual Studio codenamed "Orcas" supports development of Silverlight applications.

Unlike Flash, Silverlight applications are not pre-compiled before distribution. These are rather represented as XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Lanhuage). This makes these searchable and indexable by the search engines, overcoming a major obstruction for webmasters refraining to use flash in their webpages.

Currently in Beta, Silverlight is only supported on Windows and MacOS. It is cross-browser compatible and renders equally well on all browsers (support for Opera coming soon).

Check out the silverlight official website, here.

Get connected with the Silverlight developer community, here.