silverlight

I am on Windows 7. Included in the package was "Silverlight". What is it? I just updated it to Silverlight 5 and I have no idea what its for or how to use it. Any advice would be appreciated. Start from the very beginning.

 

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Silver light is the Windows version of Flash.

 

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What is Flash?

 

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Seriously?! flash is a web platform for multimedia streaming. Youtube runs on flash, for example.

 

Silverlight allows media to be run out-of-browser under Windows.

 

Is that a threat?

 

I'm all for open standards and all that, but from a technology point of view, I still think flash/silverlight/javafx is years ahead of what is/will soon be possible with HTML5.

 

Microsoft Silverlight is a plug-in for various browsers that allows web developers to use part of a flexible Microsoft graphics package called WPF. Think of it as allowing web developers to provide a better user interface experience. There aren't very many applications on the web that use it, and Microsoft has officially stopped developing both WPF and Silverlight so there won't be very many applications (if any at all) that utilize Silverlight moving forward.

 

Your statement about Silverlight development is confusing. I just got the latest version, which is about a week old.

Since I don't do any development, I presume this means I have no use for it?

 

Like many things that are for developers, they have to deploy it to the end-user as well or the end-user cannot get the benefit of it. In other words, if you visit any web sites that require Silverlight for the graphics presentation then you absolutely need it. If not, then there is no reason to bother.

 

A website I visited required Silverlight, so I downloaded it for free and installed it. It doesn't require any input on my side to use it. I don't even notice it is there.

 

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, with features and purposes similar to those of Adobe Flash. The run-time environment for Silverlight is available as a plug-in for web browsers running under Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, current versions support multimedia, graphics and animation, and give developers support for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight is also one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone.

Over the course of about 5 years Microsoft has released 5 versions: The first version was released in 2007; the latest version was released on 9 December 2011. It is compatible with multiple web browsers used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Mobile devices, starting with Windows Phone and Symbian (Series 60) phones, were expected to be supported in 2010.[5][6]

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