Microsoft Silverlight

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Microsoft Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued web and mobile application software framework that provided support for rich user interfaces, hardware-accelerated graphics, networking, media streaming, and data binding. Silverlight was released by Microsoft in 2007 as a competitor to Adobe Flash, but was discontinued in 2015 due to the increasing popularity of HTML5.

What does Microsoft Silverlight mean?

Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued, cross-platform application framework used to create rich Internet applications (RIAs) and media experiences for the web. It allows developers to build interactive, animated, and data-driven websites, applications, and games that can run on multiple operating systems and web browsers. Silverlight was designed as a direct competitor to Adobe Flash and offered similar capabilities, such as video playback, animation, and vector Graphics creation.

Silverlight was based on the .NET Framework and used XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) for Declarative Programming, similar to HTML and CSS used for web development. It provided a comprehensive set of controls, libraries, and tools for building complex user interfaces, data binding, and multimedia functionality. Developers could create Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic .NET and deploy them as XAP (Silverlight Application Package) files, which were then downloaded and executed by the Silverlight runtime installed on the user’s computer.

Applications

Microsoft Silverlight was particularly popular for building interactive websites, online games, and multimedia players. It was widely adopted by businesses and media companies to create engaging and visually appealing experiences for their users. Some notable applications of Silverlight include:

  • Interactive dashboards and data visualizations: Silverlight’s data binding capabilities made it ideal for creating interactive dashboards and visualizations that could display real-time data and user interactions.
  • Online games: Silverlight provided features like high-performance graphics, networking, and sound support, which made it suitable for developing multiplayer and real-time online games.
  • Streaming media players: Silverlight’s media playback capabilities allowed developers to create custom media players with features such as adaptive streaming, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and interactive controls.
  • Rich Text editing: Silverlight offered a rich text editor that enabled users to create and edit documents with formatting, images, and tables.

History

Microsoft Silverlight was first released in 2007 as a competitor to Adobe Flash. It gained initial traction in the early days of the web when Flash was the dominant technology for creating interactive content. However, Silverlight faced challenges due to its reliance on the .NET Framework and its closed-source nature compared to Flash.

Over time, HTML5 emerged as a more open and standardized alternative to Flash and Silverlight, offering similar capabilities and gaining wider browser support. As a result, the popularity of Silverlight declined, and Microsoft announced the discontinuation of the platform in 2012. Silverlight’s extended support ended in October 2021, after which it became obsolete and was no longer supported by Microsoft or any major browsers.