Microsoft Launched Silverlight to Compete with Flash
Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, launched at the NAB conference about a month ago, is being designed as a competitor to Adobe’s Flash. Silverlight is a proprietary cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for running Rich Media Applications (RIA) on the web. You need Windows XP/Vista, 450MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8+ or Internet Explorer 6+ to run the application.
Silverlight 1.0 incorporates a larger subset of the .Net Framework and supports JIT-compiled C#, Visual Basic .Net, IronPython, and (eventually) IronRuby as well. It is largely straightforward enough that you could develop applications using free HTML and JavaScript editors if you wished, supplemented by a free XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) editor, such as XAMLPad from the Windows SDK or Charles Petzold’s XAML.
It integrates seamlessly with your existing Javascript and ASP.NET AJAX code to complement functionality which you have already created. Silverlight applications can be created using Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend.
Silverlight is almost 100% upward compatible with WPF. Animation, 2D vector graphics, media, text - they’re all present in Silverlight and the concepts you’ve learnt in WPF carry forward (although Silverlight is a subset - it doesn’t support WPF features such as 3D, data binding or templates). You can use the same tools (e.g. Expression Design) to generate content for Silverlight.
“The most significant thing about Silverlight is that it basically puts the… Windows Media Video format in the browser in a really seamless way. The reason we haven’t supported Windows Media Video until now is because we felt that the user experience wasn’t there,” said Adam Berrey, vice president of marketing and strategy at the company.
To conclude this, Silverlight is part of a larger revolution of the ways applications are designed, built, and delivered. With markup-based UI and flexible programming models, businesses will be able to offer better experiences on the right form factor for their customers.
Source: Infoworld
Filed under Enterprise Software