Saturday, March 08, 2008

Silverlight – Lighting up the web!

“Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

By using Expression Studio and Visual Studio, designers and developers can collaborate more effectively using the skills they have today to light up the Web of tomorrow.”

That’s the quote from Microsoft on www.silverlight.net about this new technology that takes the richness and power of WPF to the web world.

When I first learnt about Silverlight, the available version was 1.0 and was using Javascript as its coding language. After knowing that .NET support is on its way and getting chance to try my hands on the pre-release builds, I waited for version 2.0 to come. The beta version of Silverlight 2.0 was released last week.

Silverlight is a browser plug-in that allows the browser to use some of the user’s local computational horsepower. The plug-in has no external dependencies. For example, Mac users do not need Windows Media Player to play back WMV content. We are already familiar with plug-in technologies like Java Applets and Flash applications. But Silverlight brings all the power of WPF in animation, graphics, video, etc. And with version 2.0, the CLR (Common Language Runtime) is going cross platform and developers can use their favorite .NET language to write code that runs on the client from within a browser.

No comments:

Post a Comment