Silverlight will put rich and highly interactive Web content into the hands of millions of developers using Visual Studio. With Silverlight, the Flash monopoly for these types of applications is over. Creating rich and highly interactive browser content has been pretty much the sole domain of Adobe Flash for many years. Silverlight promises to do the same thing for creating rich Web-based experiences. Windows development no longer required developers to be Jedi Masters-they were now in range of Padawan learners such as me. Visual Basic changed developing applications for the Windows platform. Before Visual Basic, developing even the most trivial Windows applications required the skills of a C/C++ Jedi Master. Silverlight can do for browsers what Visual Basic did for Windows development. The Visual Studio Debugger is now capable of debugging Silverlight applications on Macintosh computers. Debuggingĭebugging in Silverlight rocks! At MIX, Scott Guthrie had a cool demo where he opened his debugger and attached to processes running on a (drum roll please) Macintosh computer that was running his Silverlight applet. The Silverlight 1.1 download measures in at a lean and mean 4.5 MB. When it comes to deploying a Web application, size definitely matters. Silverlight also runs on the Macintosh supporting Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0, and Safari. Silverlight under Windows (XP and Vista) supports IE6, IE7, Firefox 1.5.0.8 and Firefox 2.0. Silverlight shines when it comes to browser and operating system compatibility. Compatibilityĭoes Silverlight leave you behind and make you upgrade? No. One namespace I am rooting for is System.Data since currently Silverlight has no concept of the data types contained in the System.Data namespace. You are no longer stuck using just what Microsoft decided to include. Pay for play give developers the opportunity to incorporate other namespaces not included by the default Silverlight installation. I fully expect Microsoft to add more functionality to these namespaces as development proceeds.Īnother unique aspect of Silverlight is the concept of “pay for play”. While these namespaces don't have 100% of their full framework representations they are definitely a good start. Namespaces (albeit with limited functionality) included with Silverlight 1.1 include: NET Compact Framework but a completely different fork of code tuned to run as a small footprint applet. This is not a trimmed down version of the. The name “mini” is my own and is not a new definition from Microsoft. NET Framework, a “mini” CLR and “mini” versions of various. This environment has a “mini” version of the. Silverlight 1.1 (alpha release) is a CLR-based development environment. WPF/E includes a JavaScript-based presentation later that mimics the functionality of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). WPF/E uses JavaScript code to provide its user and developer experience. Silverlight 1.0 (still in beta) uses WPF/E. The Silverlight that is… Microsoft actually showed us two flavors of Silverlight in development. Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Mix 07 conference where Microsoft showed us the light. Just like Flash, Silverlight is a cross-platform (Windows and MAC) browser applet that runs WPF and CLR code all in a nice sandboxed environment. Silverlight is a CLR-based competitor to Flash. To better understand what Silverlight is you simply need to take a look at Adobe Flash. Microsoft has officially entered the space of rich-interactive browser development with a new product called Silverlight.
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