Microsoft Silverlight

Yesterday Tom asked me what is Microsoft Silverlight so i told him that Silverlight is a cross
browser, cross-platform and cross-device browser plug-in that helps companies design, develop and deliver applications and experiences on the Web. A free download that installs in seconds, Silverlight enables a new class of rich, secure and scalable cross-platform experiences. Silverlight 3 introduces major media enhancements, out of browser support allowing Web applications to work on the desktop; significant graphics improvements including perspective 3D graphics support, GPU acceleration and H.264 video support; and many features to improve RIA development productivity. To fully integrate all the .NET developer tools, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight.Silverlight 3 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 3 without any additional download of run time 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:

• Desktop shortcuts and start menu support. Place an application on the desktop and be one click away from your customer.
• Run outside of browser. You no longer need the distraction of the browser chrome.
• Safer, more secure, sandboxed. An application can be trusted without security warnings, keeping your customers safer.
• Consumer friendly non-administrator install. Applications are held in a cache and do not require any privileges to run.
• Built in auto-update. An application will check for new versions on the server and update on launch.
• Connectivity detection (in browser, out of browser) – can detect a loss of connection and then chose to cache users work until the reconnect.
• Demonstrates dynamic languages (Python and Ruby) by showing the DLR Console sample.

Things that Silver Light can do:

Dynamic Languages:

Dynamic languages provide an interactive approach to developing Silverlight-based applications. You can also use them to enable scripting for users of a Silverlight-based application.

Audio And Video

Silverlight includes support to play audio and video files.

Images

In Silverlight, you have several options for displaying images such as pictures and diagrams.

Deep Zoom

Deep Zoom provides the ability to interactively view high-resolution images in Silverlight. You can zoom in and out of images rapidly without affecting the performance of your application.

Control Templets

In Silverlight, you create a control template when you want to customize a control's visual structure and visual behavior. Controls have many properties, such as Background,Foreground and Font Family, that you can set to specify different aspects of the control's appearance. However, the changes that you can make by setting these properties are limited. You can use the Control Template class to create a template that provides additional customization.

Data Binding to Controls

Most Silverlight-based applications display data in controls. In many cases, the data is a business object or a collection of business objects, such as stock quotes, headlines, or images. In addition, you often want to enable the user to select an item from a list and then display details about that item in another control, such as a text box.

LINQ TO XML

You can parse XML data in Silverlight by using either Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) to XML or the XmlReader class. One common XML scenario is parsing and transforming RSS feeds and displaying the content on a site. Because RSS is an XML format, LINQ to XML can be used to easily query and transform the RSS feed.
RSS feeds typically contain news content, but they can contain anything that can be organized into discrete items. In its simplest form, an RSS feed consists of a channel, which has a title, link, and description. An RSS feed can also contain one or more item elements, each of which has a title, link, description, and possibly other elements.

Syndication Feeds

This describes how to create a Silverlight client that can access and display a syndication service that exposes either an RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0 syndication feed.

Web Services

Silverlight has built-in support for communicating with Web services.