Microsoft Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight is an internet browser plugin for playing Rich Internet Applications such as vector graphics, animation, and audio-video playback. Silverlight gives developers capability to enhance the usability of their websites. The plugin is easily installed and compatible with most modern web browsers running on a Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows based system, and is available for free from Microsoft. The up to date version, Microsoft Silverlight 4, was released to the public on April 15, 2010. XAML Extensible Application Markup Language is at the heart of Silverlight. The .NET framework powers Silverlight. Silverlight includes elements from WPF Windows Presentation Framework. However is lighter and more crossplatform. WPF the Windows Presentation Framework is more gui-oriented. The Deep Zoom feature allows seamless viewing and zooming of large images also it loads only the data essential to show the part of an image which the user is viewing. Silverlight applications and websites can be created with Microsoft Expressions Studio and Visual Studio. Expression Blend with Sketchflow is also useful for prototyping. Silverlight is capable of delivering traditional streaming and Smooth Streaming of high definition video via IIS. Moonlight is the open-source implementation of Silverlight for Linux systems. Moonlight is currently at version 2.