

MICRO SOFT SILVERLIGHT WINDOWS
In addition, Silverlight is considered to be the main development framework for Windows Phone. Supports a variety of enterprise technologies including WCF.Supports a variety of rich controls including the DataGrid.Supports a variety of media (audio/video) formats with streaming capabilities.Enables business application development.Easy to create excellent UIs that looks "WOW".It can be run in browser and as a desktop application.It runs on all popular browsers, platforms, and devices.Other than being delivered by Microsoft, some features of Silverlight are: Now, let’s have a look at Microsoft Silverlight features and see what makes it the best RIA platform yet. Looking at the above diagrams, we can see that Microsoft Silverlight did a great job in a very short time (first release was on 2007.) However, we can’t depend much on this data since, as you know, Microsoft Silverlight is installed automatically on Windows machines via Windows Update. StatOWL shows a bit different data with more details: And Sun Java comes third with about 73% of internet-connected machines. Microsoft Silverlight comes in the second place with about 74% of total internet-connected machines. The first diagram we have comes from and it shows that Adobe Flash is installed on almost 96% of internet-connected machines.

Now someone asks: Who wins the race? What’s the best RIA platform that one can spend his time and effort to learn?įirst of all, let’s have a look at the following diagrams that represent penetration rates of Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun Java. It is worth mentioning that every platform of the above mentioned (that includes Silverlight of course) is available through a plugin for the browser, and therefore its runtime must be installed on user’s machine in order to be able to run the application. The most famous platforms are Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun Java. Today, there’re lots of technologies available for creating RIA applications.

So we can say that RIA applications have the best functionalities and user interface features of desktop applications and Web applications. It’s very similar to desktop applications comparing interactivity and features however, it’s a Web application that runs on the browser not the desktop. We have been talking about rich interactive applications for a while now let’s see what a rich interactive application really means.Ī Rich Interactive/Internet Application (RIA) is a Web application that’s very interactive with the user and has lots of functionalities.
MICRO SOFT SILVERLIGHT CODE
You can host your Silverlight application on a Windows, Linux, or Mac server without any additional code changes or configuration.

One more interesting thing is that Silverlight Web applications can be hosted on any server. Really it can run everywhere without any code changes! It can run on Windows, Linux, and even Mac, it can run on Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and many others, and it also can run on PCs, mobile devices, and handhelds. It’s said to be cross-platform, cross-browser, and cross-device. Unlike many other Microsoft technologies, Silverlight applications can run everywhere. And that actually what Silverlight is devoted for, its main goal is to allow for developing rich interactive applications for the Web. Common examples of rich applications are online document editors and image processors both are very interactive and offer lots of functionalities that are usually not available for standard Web applications. Indeed, we mean by “rich” those have lots of functionalities not available for standard Web applications. When we say rich applications, we don’t mean those with amazing interfaces and lots of graphics. It’s available as a plugin for almost all famous browsers available today, and it’s used to deliver the next generation media and Web applications. Silverlight is a Microsoft technology aimed to help developers create rich interactive Web applications with the best user interface features and functionalities. Get ready! What is Silverlight Definition In this article, we’ll see a brief introduction to Microsoft Silverlight, see how it fits with other technologies today, and watch it in action.
