Silverlight is a powerful development platform for

creating rich media applications and business

applications for the Web, desktop, and mobile devices.
Silverlight is a free plug-in powered by the .NET
framework that is compatible across multiple
browsers, devices and operating systems to bring a
new level of interactivity wherever the Web works.
With support for advanced data integration,
multithreading, HD video using IIS Smooth Streaming,
and built in content protection, Silverlight enables
online and offline applications for a broad range of
business and consumer scenarios.

IIS Smooth Streaming

IIS Smooth Streaming, an IIS7 Media Services 3.0 extension, enables adaptive streaming of live and on-
demand media via standard HTTP protocols, and provides a high-quality viewing experience that scales
on massive content-distribution networks, bringing a fantastic visual experience to any viewer
regardless of their connection and computer capabilities.

Media Format Extensibility

With the new Raw AV pipeline, Silverlight can easily support a wide variety of third-party codecs. Audio
and video can be decoded outside the runtime and rendered in Silverlight, extending format support
beyond the native codecs

Out of Browser

Silverlight offers a new set of features for building light-weight, sandboxed companion experiences for
the Web that run on the desktop. Silverlight out of browser allows websites to build even closer,
persistent relationships with customers. It enables the application to be placed in a restricted store on
the user’s machine; and then provide a link directly to it from the user’s desktop or start menu. This is all
enabled within Silverlight without any additional download of runtime or the need to write applications
in a different way. An application can now be easily found on the user’s desktop or start menu, and
launched with a single click. In addition, it can test if the network is connected, it can update itself, and
can also have access to Isolated Storage. Taken together, these features represent a radical upgrade to
the web experience.

Sketch Flow

SketchFlow, part of Expression Studio Ultimate, revolutionizes the speed and efficiency with which
you can demonstrate a vision for an application. SketchFlow provides an informal and quick way to
explore, iterate and prototype user interface scenarios allowing you to evolve your concepts from a
series of rough ideas into a living breathing prototype that can be made as real as a particular client or
project demands.

New Controls

 Silverlight is packed with over 60 high-quality, fully skinnable and customizable out-of-the-box
controls such as charting and media, new layout containers such as dock and viewbox, and
controls such as autocomplete, treeview and datagrid. The controls come with nine professional
designed themes and the source code can be modified/recompiled or utilized as-is. Other
additions include multiple selection in listbox controls, file save dialog making it easier to write
files, and support for multiple page applications with navigation.

Perspective 3D Graphics

 Silverlight 3 allows developers and designers to apply content to a 3D plane. Users can rotate or
scale live content in space without writing any additional code. Other effects include creating a
queue in 3D and transitions.

Skinning and Styling

 Silverlight makes it easy to create graphics and then use them to customize controls, such as the
look of a scrollbar. Silverlight provides XAML based templates for each control that allow
designers to reach inside the control and change the layout or look of each part of the control
without rewriting any code. For example, a scrollbar is made up of a layout container and a set
of parts such as the up and down button and draggable thumb. Parts can be rearranged and
their appearance changed to fully customize the control. In addition, controls can be themed by
applying a style. For instance you can offer a range of different colors or font sizes.

Deep Zoom

Silverlight Deep Zoom is the fastest, smoothest, zooming technology on the Web, bringing the
highest resolution images and frame rates with the lowest load times to users. Deep Zoom also enables
the display of thousands of items simultaneously, giving designers and developers new opportunities to
create innovative navigation paradigms for both applications and the Web.
 By optimizing the way images are stored and intelligently downloading only the pieces of
information needed to fill the screen, Deep Zoom removes technical barriers and enables the delivery of
engaging customer and content-centric experiences.

PivotViewer

PivotViewer makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data on the web in ways that are
powerful, informative, and fun. By visualizing thousands of related items at once, users can see trends
and patterns that would be hidden when looking at one item at a time.

Because PivotViewer leverages Deep Zoom, it displays full, high-resolution content without long
load times, while the animations and natural transitions provide context and prevent users from feeling
overwhelmed by large quantities of information. This simple, inviting interaction model encourages
exploration and longer audience engagement times, and applies broadly to a variety of content types.

Silverlight1

 Silverlight 1, which was developed under the codename Windows Presentation

Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) and released in 2007, consists of the core presentation
framework, which is responsible for the user interface (UI), interactivity and user input, basic UI
controls, graphics and animation, media playback, Digital rights management (DRM),
and DOM integration. It is made up of the following components:

 Input—handling input from devices like keyboard, mouse, stylus etc.

 UI core—managing rendering of bitmap images (including compressed raster images like Joint
Photographic Experts Group (JPEG)), vector graphics, text and animations.

 Media—playback of MP3, WMA Standard, WMV7, WMV8 and WMV9/VC-1 streams.

 XAML—to allow the UI layout to be created using XAML markup language

Silverlight 2

 Silverlight 2 (previously referred to as version 1.1) [15] includes a version of the .NET Framework,

implementing the same full Common Language Runtime (CLR) version as .NET Framework 3.0;
so it can execute programs written in any .NET language. (By default, however, you cannot
reference assemblies compiled with the regular .NET Framework. [citation needed]) Unlike the CLR
included with .NET Framework version 3.5 and earlier, but like .NET Framework 4.0, the CoreCLR
instance included in Silverlight can be hosted with another instance of one of the desktop CLRs
in one single process.[16] With this, the XAML layout markup file (.xaml file) can be augmented
by code-behind code, written in any .NET language, which contains the programming logic. It
can be used to programmatically manipulate both the Silverlight application and the HTML page
which hosts the Silverlight control. The XAML markup, as well as the code, is compiled into .NET
assemblies which are then compressed using ZIP and stored in a .xap file.
 Silverlight ships with a lightweight class library which includes features such as
extensible controls, XML Web Services, networkingcomponents and Language Integrated
Query (LINQ) APIs. This class library is a subset of, and is considerably smaller than, .NET
Framework's Base Class Library (BCL). Silverlight code runs in a sandbox, thus preventing the
invocation of platform APIs.

 The version of .NET Framework in Silverlight adds [13] a subset of Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF) UI-programming model, including support for shapes, documents, media and
animation objects of WPF. Beta 2 onwards, [19] it ships with more than 30 UI
controls[20] (including TextBox, CheckBox, Slider,ScrollViewer, and Calendar controls),[21] for two-
way databinding support, automated layout management (by means ofStackPanel, Grid, etc.)
[21]
 as well as data-manipulation controls, such as DataGrid[15][22] and ListBox.[21] UI controls are
skinnable using a template-based approach. [21] Third-party libraries of expanded UI-control sets
are also available.[23]

 The included BCL provides classes for collections, reflection, regular expressions, string

handling and data access. It also supports LINQ, with full support for LINQ to Objects
andexpression trees. Almost all of the System.Linq and System.Linq.Expressionnamespaces are
exposed. It also supports serialization of objects, for data persistence. Silverlight can handle data
in Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or JSON format, in addition to XML. The BCL provides
enhanced support for working with XML data, including theXMLReader and XMLWriter classes.
Silverlight 2 also supports asynchronous programming via the use of the threading libraries

 Silverlight also includes classes for data access over XML-based Web services,Representational

State Transfer (REST), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services and ADO.NET Data
Services.[19] The networking support in Silverlight can be used by Silverlight applications to
communicate using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or at the lower socket level. Cross-
domain communication is supported.[20] Silverlight uses an XML-based configuration file to
control the cross-domain resource-access policy, for both HTTP and socket connections. It can
be used by site administrators to control which resources a Silverlight application can access,
when that application did not originate in the domain of the site. In addition, Silverlight also
supports the Adobe Flash Cross-domain policy file format.[24]Silverlight sockets can only initiate a
connection; they cannot listen for connections

 Silverlight 2 includes[19] the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) which allows dynamic compilation

and execution of dynamic (scripting) languages. Compilers for the languages based on the DLR
(including IronPython and IronRuby) are [to be?] packaged with the Dynamic Languages
application in the .xap package.[26] The Dynamic Languages software development kit (SDK)
includes a web server namedChiron, that can dynamically package all the dependencies for the
Dynamic Languages application and serve it to the browser. [26] The first upcoming languages
written for the DLR are Managed JScript, IronPython 2.0, and IronRuby. Microsoft also plans to
build Visual Basic .NET 10.0 (VBx) on the DLR. All four languages share the same infrastructure,
to allow Silverlight to compile and execute the language source. Conversely, other .NET
 languages must be compiled ahead-of-time and delivered to Silverlight as .NET assemblies. The
implementation of Managed JScript conforms to the ECMAScript 3.0 specification, and Microsoft
asserts that it is 250 times faster than interpreted JScript. [

 With the integration of .NET Framework, Silverlight also allows HTML-managed code interaction,
which enables the manipulation of HTML DOM elements from managed code,[13] and permits
JavaScript code to call managed code and use objects instantiated by managed code. Silverlight
encloses JavaScript objects and DOM elements in managed wrappers to make them available
from managed code.[27] While there is no provision for calling JavaScript code directly in the 1.1
alpha release, managed-code events can fire JavaScript handlers. A Silverlight instance does not
need to have a UI component in order to manipulate the HTML DOM from managed code. [28] It is
done by creating a XAMLCanvas with both width and height set to zero, and using its code-
behind code to modify the Document Object Model of the HTML page via the APIs in
the System.Browser namespace.[29]

 Silverlight 2 includes Deep Zoom, a technology derived from Microsoft Live Labs' Seadragon. It

allows users to zoom into, or out of, an image (or a collage of images), with smooth transitions,
using the mouse wheel.[30] The images can scale from 2 or 3 megapixels in resolution into the
gigapixel range, but the user need not wait for it to be downloaded entirely; rather, Silverlight
downloads only the parts in view, optimized for the zoom level being viewed. [31] Beta 2 onwards,
Deep Zoom uses an XML-based file format.

 Media features in Silverlight 2 include:[32]

 WMA Professional support, including WMA 10 Pro low-bitrate modes. However, multi-channel
audio content is still down-converted to stereo output.

 Content protection powered by Microsoft PlayReady DRM client.

 Server-side playlists in Windows Media Services.

 Media Stream Source API.

 The Media Stream Source is the API responsible for enabling adaptive streaming of media.
Adaptive streaming allows the player application to choose the bit rate of the media based on
available client bandwidth and central processing unit (CPU) resources.[19] Media Stream Source
allows the developer to specify a custom method of retrieving media data, the only requirement
being that the final video and audio streams be presented to Silverlight runtime in a format that
Silverlight can decode (VC-1, H.264, WMA, MP3, etc.). This allows extensible support for
otherwise natively unsupported file formats (i.e. MP4, Matroska, Ogg), protocols (i.e. Shoutcast)
and delivery methods (i.e. adaptive streaming,peer-to-peer (P2P)). Microsoft first publicly
showcased Media Stream Source by powering the NBC Olympics website with their own
implementation of adaptive streaming.[33]
  Silverlight 2 also allows limited filesystem access to Silverlight applications. [27] It can use the
operating system's native file dialog box to browse to any file (to which the user has access). The
file is sanitized of path information, to prevent the application from getting access to
information such as user name, and can be opened only in read-only mode. For local storage of
data, Silverlight provides isolated local storage (isostorage),[27] namely, outside the browser
cache, in a folder hidden inside the private user-profile folder. It is set to 1 MB per URL by
default,[27] but this can be changed by the user. [19] Data stored by a Silverlight application in the
isostorage is identified by the URL from which it loads, and can be accessed by that application
only. All instances of Silverlight share the same isostorage, so all instances of the same
Silverlight application can share the saved data, even if they are running on different browsers.

 Silverlight CoreCLR uses an attribute-based security model, as opposed to the Code Access

Security (CAS) model of the desktop version of .NET Framework. [34] Assemblies are marked with
a security attribute, which can
be transparent (SecurityTransparentAttribute), safecritical (SecuritySafeCriticalAttribute)
or critical(SecurityCriticalAttribute). Methods in transparent assemblies run with partial trust,
and codes within such assemblies cannot call critical methods (methods which can cause
system-wide changes); neither can transparent assemblies contain unverifiable code (use
the unsafe C# keyword or use pointers) or invoke system functions by means of P/Invoke. Code
in both critical and safecritical assemblies run with full trust, and are therefore not subject to
such limitations. However, a transparent method can call a safecritical method, and
asafecritical method can call a critical method. In such a case, the safecritical method will verify
that the call is both safe and within the limited rights of the caller; if so, then
thesafecritical method will proxy the call to the requested critical method. In fact, the
IsoStorage APIs are exposed as safecritical methods.[34] An assembly whose security attribute is
unset is run as a transparent method. Analogous limitations also apply to type-inheritance;
namely, in the cases of virtual-method calls and interface-method calls. [35] Silverlight assemblies
can contain members that are not usable by CoreCLR, as long as they can be processed by the
.NET Framework CLR; such methods will not be loaded when the assembly is being executed by
CoreCLR.

 However, only platform code is allowed to be marked as critical or safecritical. The Silverlight

runtime ensures that platform assemblies are loaded only from the Silverlight installation
directory, and are digitally signed by Microsoft. This effectively means that user-application
assemblies can only be transparent code (run under partial trust and limited rights). [37]Platform
code can be marked with either attribute. The BCL methods of the .NET Framework, which have
the Internet attribute set, allowing them to be called from untrusted code originating from
Internet, are exposed in Silverlight BCL as transparent methods.[37]

Silverlight 3

 Silverlight 3 was announced at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) 2008 show

in Amsterdam on September 12, 2008. It was unveiled at MIX09 in Las Vegas on March 18, 2009.
 [38]
 A beta version was made available for download the same day. The final version was released
July 9, 2009.

 Silverlight 3 includes an increased number of controls [39]—including but not limited

to DataGrid, TreeView, various layout panels, DataForm for forms-driven applications
and DataPager for viewing paginated data. Some of these controls are from the Silverlight
Toolkit. In addition, Silverlight 3 includes a navigation framework to let Silverlight applications
use the hyperlinked navigation model as well as enabling deep-linking(linking directly to specific
pages) within Silverlight applications.

 On the media front, Silverlight 3 supports Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio decoding as well
as hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding. [39] Silverlight 3 also offers 1080p smooth
streaming.[40][41] The native multimedia pipeline is also programmatically exposed, so that other
formats can also be supported by third-parties using managed code decoders.[39] Silverlight 3
supports perspective 3D[39] which enables 3D transformations of 2D elements. [42] These
transformations, as well as many 2D operations like stretches, alpha blending etc. are hardware
accelerated.[42] Custom animations, including transforms and blends, can be created on
Silverlight elements using High Level Shader Language (HLSL) to make use of pixel shaders.
[42]
 A bitmap API is provided to let Silverlight 3 applications manipulate bitmaps. [42] Silverlight
now uses the graphics processing unit(GPU) to accelerate the composition of Visual Trees (like
WPF, Silverlight elements correspond to Visual elements, which, when coupled with the layout
information, forms aComposition Tree or Visual Tree which is then rendered to form the final
display; see WPF architecture).[39] Visual trees can now be cached;[39] this increases performance
in cases like transforms, which creates lots of throw-away intermediate states, by not making
the state transitions on the main Visual tree. Silverlight 3 now also supports ClearType text
rendering.

 UI elements in Silverlight 3 supports element-to-element binding—which allows one element to

be bound to the state of another element, [42] as well as a validation mechanism for data binding.
[39]
 Unlike Silverlight 2, which allowed the applications to save files only to the local isostorage,
Silverlight 3 applications can save to any location on the file system via the system Save
File dialog. However, the path where the file is saved will still be hidden from the Silverlight
application.[39] Any external assemblies used by Silverlight applications are cached too so that
they need not be redownloaded for subsequent instantiations of the application. [39]

 Silverlight 3 also includes a LocalConnection API to communicate (using a named pipe style

model) among multiple running applications on the same machine, irrespective of the
browser[39][42] and can monitor for network connectivity events. [39] Silverlight 3 can optionally
use Binary XML to communicate with WCF services.

 Silverlight 3 supports Out-of-Browser experiences, i.e., Silverlight applications can be installed to

the system for offline access (provided the application manifest is designed to allow local
installation) where they run outside the browser. They are launched using the Start Menu or
 desktop shortcuts, and run without the browser window. [39] Applications can check whether
they are running inside a browser or not. [43] When running outside of a browser, HTML interop is
disabled. In addition, access to the Function Keys is enabled.[44] Locally installed Silverlight
applications still run in a sandbox.[44]

 Installed Silverlight 3 applications automatically check for updates asynchronously on every

launch and updates are automatically installed. [45] Running instances of the applications are
informed when updates are available.[43]

 Silverlight 3 is now listed as a requirement for eFiling income tax returns for free in the US.

Silverlight 4

On November 18, 2009, at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft

Corporation unveiled a Beta version of Silverlight 4.The final version was released on April 15, 2010
(along with Silverlight 4 tools for developers. New features in Silverlight 4 include:

 Support for Google's Chrome browser.

 Web cam and microphone support.

 Printing support.

 Improved mouse support including right button support and mouse wheel support.

 New notification support to display messages to end users.

 New and enhanced controls such as a RichTextBox and an enhanced DataGrid control.

 New support for implicit theming of controls.

 New hosted browser support for rendering HTML inside Silverlight.

 WCF data layer enhancements.

 Localization enhancements with bi-directional text.

 Support for Managed Extensibility Framework.

 Enhanced data binding support.

 Enhanced animation effects.

 Clipboard and drag and drop support.

 Deep Zoom performance enhancements.

 WCF Rich Internet application (RIA) Services.

  Content protection for H.264 and support for playing offline DRM protected media.

Silverlight 5

On December 2, 2010 at the Silverlight Firestarter event, Silverlight 5 beta was announced for release in
the 1st half of 2011. The final release is planned for the end of 2011. New features in Silverlight 5
include:

 Supports GPU accelerated video decoding

 Built in 3D graphics support (not to be confused with stereoscopic 3D)

 Variable speed playback of media content with automatic audio pitch correction

 Improved power awareness

 Built in Remote-control support

 Supports faster application startup

 Provides 64-bit browser support

 Automated UI testing support for applications with Visual Studio 2010

 Delivers improved text clarity

 Developers can now debug data-binding expressions, set breakpoints on bindings.

System requirements

The system requirements for Microsoft Silverlight and associated technologies are listed below.

Windows

 Operating System: Windows 7,Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 2

 Intel® Pentium® III 450MHz or faster processor (or equivalent)

 128MB of RAM

Mac OS

 Operating System: Apple Mac OS X 10.4.8 or above

 Intel Core™ Duo 1.83GHz or faster processor

 128MB of RAM
Future

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful platform for creating and delivering rich Internet applications and
media experiences on the Web. Silverlight 5 builds on the foundation of Silverlight 4 for building
business applications, premium media applications and applications that reach beyond the browser.
Silverlight 5 introduces more than 40 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications
with desktop features in the browser, dramatic video quality and performance improvements, and
features that improve developer productivity.