Silverlight is a software tool out of Microsoft ideal for making amazing, rich internet applications, its in actual fact very similar in features and intention to Adobe Flash.
Silverlight is a software tool out of Microsoft ideal for making amazing,
rich internet applications, its in actual fact very similar in features and intention to Adobe Flash.
Microsoft themselves summarize their product as being a formidable development tool for making engaging, interactive user experiences for Web and mobile applications.
Several of the numerous functions stated in their website contains, IIS Smooth Streaming, Pivot Viewer, for visualizing large volumes of data in a fun and visual way, Sketch Flow, more for sketching out an application and its uses, Deep Zoom, Pixel Shader and over 60 new controls similar to charting and new media.
Nonetheless, as opposed to Flash, Silverlight is a free plugin which is actually operated by the .Net framework, thus really easy and also intuitive to work with with Visual Studio, and its compatible with a variety of browsers and devices.
At first Microsoft concentrated on streaming media etc but since then Silverlight has improved substantially to feature support for multimedia, graphics and animation.
Silverlight at this point also features support for specified languages and development tools, in fact it is also one of the top development platforms for the Windows phone.
Silverlight furthermore employs XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) to declare user interfaces, because of this it is simple to create Windows sidebar gadgets and also other fancy apps with neat vector graphics and animations.
It's also possible to write Silverlight applications in any .Net programming languages, which means that any development application which you can use in .Net, you can also use in Silverlight. Hence Microsoft are pitching Visual Studio as the ideal tool for developers to create and debug Silverlight applications.
Since its introduction in 2007, Microsoft have updated Silverlight every year with version 1 in 2007 and edition 5 (the latest and up to-date model) unveiled in May 2012. The 2012 version (Silverlight 5) can actually be used on Windows and Mac and with Mobile devices running Windows or Symbian.
The below features each one of the editions and offers some backdrop information.
Silverlight 1 was introduced in 2007, it had been composed of a number of core capabilities such as UI controls, media playback, DOM integration, interactivity and user input, and graphics and animation.
Silverlight 2 followed later from the same year and was a lot like version 1 but additionally provided a version of the .Net framework which allowed it to run any other programs developed in any .Net language.
Silverlight3 was released in 2008 as a beta after which they officially unveiled in July 2009. This version incorporated even more controls for example DataGrid and TreeView, DataPager (made it possible for you see paginated data), DataForm (for form based applications) along with a variety of layout panels.
Silverlight 4 was introduced in November 2009 as a beta with the official release in April 2010. This provided a lot more capabilities than ever before for example rendering HTML, better localization, support for Google Chrome browser, brand new and improved controls and so much more. It also sported Silverlight 4 tools for developers, offering all the more development options
Silverlight 5 was introduced for download in December 2011. The latest capabilities included 64-bit support, 3D graphics, GPU accelerated video decoding and playback speed controls.
As mentioned above, Silverlight applications can be designed in any .NET programming language. Therefore, any kind of development tools that may be utilized with .NET languages can also work with Silverlight. For anyone who is dealing with Silverlight and XML, you can even work with an
XML Silverlight tool like Liquid XML studio.
