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Silverlight is a powerful development tool for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for Web and mobile applications. Silverlight is a free plug-in, powered by the .NET framework and compatible with multiple browsers, devices and operating systems, bringing a new level of interactivity wherever the Web works.
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.
Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), 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.
Silverlight for Diverse Solutions
- Media
The highest quality interactive video experiences both live and on-demand across multiple formats while protecting valuable content.
Silverlight lets developers rapidly build and deploy rich media applications for the Web and mobile devices.
Whether you are designing on-demand or live streaming services in the enterprise or for consumers, Silverlight offers support for popular platforms and integrates with Microsoft Media Platform technologies for dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP and DECE-approved digital rights management.
Open source frameworks for advanced playback, editing, analytics and content management dramatically enhance service functionality, economy and monetization opportunities.
- Business
Create business applications that give users richer, deeper interactivity using the skills and tools developers already know and that work the same everywhere–without the usual IT hassle of deploying across multiple OS's and browsers.
Silverlight is a powerful development tool that lets .NET developers rapidly develop and deploy applications for the Web, and mobile devices.
Using Silverlight for their applications, developers can create applications with richness and interactivity out of reach of traditional web technologies while retaining the simple deployment and update model of web applications.
With Silverlight, developers use their existing skills and environments -- .NET, C#, XAML, VB.NET, WPF, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, Eclipse – to build applications that work on major browsers across Windows, Mac, Linux and native apps on Windows Phone.
- Mobile
Build compelling touch-based apps built quickly using familiar tools and distributed through the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Features of Microsoft Silverlight
IIS Smooth Streaming
IIS Smooth Streaming enables you to deliver high definition streams that play back smoothly on any device running Silverlight.
IIS Smooth Streaming, an IIS7 Media Services 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.
Deep Zoom
Silverlight Deep Zoom is the fastest, smoothest, zooming technology on the Web, bringing the highest resolution images and frame rates.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Silverlight PivotViewer control is available now and can be accessed by developers and designers to begin creating collections and deploying solutions.
Pixel Shader
These software based effects include blur and drop shadow that can be applied to any graphical content and animated. You can also write your own effect.
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.
SketchFlow
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.
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.
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Technologies