Microsoft Silverlight, A competitor for Adobe Flash

Microsoft Silverlight


A Competitor for Adobe Flash from Micrsoft


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

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

http://silverlight.net/

Microsoft Silverlight (code-named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E) is a proprietary runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation. Version 1.1 also includes a complete version of the .NET Common Language Runtime, named CoreCLR,so that Silverlight applications can be written in any .NET language.

The latest release is version 1.0 beta, with an alpha release of version 1.1 made available as well. The runtime is available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.4, with browser plugins available for Internet Explorer 6.0/7.0, Firefox 1.5/2.0 and Safari 2.0; Opera is not supported in the current releases but will be supported with future builds,as will be Windows 2000.Additional platforms are being considered as well.

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.The first CTP of Silverlight was released in December 2006. Microsoft aims to have a final release by mid-2007. An unattributed report claimed that Microsoft aims to release certain parts of Silverlight source code as open source software, but the claim has been denied by Microsoft. Sam Ramji, Microsoft director of platform technology strategy, said Microsoft has no plans to open source Silverlight.However, portions of the Dynamic Language Runtime, included with Silverlight, have been made available on Microsoft's CodePlex website using the Microsoft Permissive License.

Source

Comments