Microsoft Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework that integrates multimedia, computer graphics, animation and interactivity into a single runtime environment. Initially released as a video streaming plugin, later versions brought additional interactivity features and support for CLI languages and development tools. The current version 4 was released in April 2010. Features of Silverlight are similar to those in Adobe Flash.

It is compatible with multiple web browsers used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Mobile devices, starting with Windows Phone 7 and Symbian (Series 60) phones, are likely to become supported in 2010. A free software implementation named Moonlight, developed by Novell in cooperation with Microsoft, is available to bring most Silverlight functionality to Linux, FreeBSD and other open source platforms.

Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation, and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) and programmed using a subset of the .NET Framework. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations. Silverlight can also be used to create Windows Sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista.

Silverlight supports Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio (WMA) and MPEG Layer III (MP3) media content across all supported browsers without requiring Windows Media Player, the Windows Media Player ActiveX control or Windows Media browser plugins. Because Windows Media Video 9 is an implementation of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) VC-1 standard, Silverlight also supports VC-1 video, though still only in an Advanced Systems Format (ASF) container format. Furthermore, the Software license agreement says VC-1 is only licensed for the "personal and non-commercial use of a consumer". Silverlight, since version 3, supports the playback of H.264 video. Silverlight makes it possible to dynamically load Extensible Markup Language (XML) content that can be manipulated through a Document Object Model (DOM) interface, a technique that is consistent with conventional Ajax techniques. Silverlight exposes a Downloader object which can be used to download content, like scripts, media assets or other data, as may be required by the application. With version 2, the programming logic can be written in any .NET language, including some derivatives of common dynamic programming languages like IronRuby and IronPython.