Silverlight was formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere. Yes! Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) now has an official name - Microsoft Silverlight. It is "blindingly fast" and a strong competitor to Adobe Flash and promises to be the technology of choice for designing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) in the years to come. It is a cross-browser, cross platform plug-in, a light-weight subset of XAML, which supports Ajax, Python, Ruby, etc., and helps develop Rich Internet Applications (RIA) with awesome media experiences. "Microsoft Silverlight provides a comprehensive environment for delivering rich media experiences online and beyond. With the support of Rhozet's suite of transcoding solutions, content providers will gain tremendous versatility and efficiencies for rich video distribution to Silverlight-based experiences."

Silverlight promotes a collaborative development of rich online media content that enables the developers and designers to integrate awesome graphics into Ajax enabled web pages. Moreover, you can create and even preview your code at real time. You can write your code in Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) in the Microsoft .NET environment and then integrate within it rich graphics and animations, without being skeptical about the compatibility issues. Tim Sneath says, "By separating markup (XAML) from code, Silverlight provides a familiar web metaphor for designers and developers. You can embed XAML directly within an HTML file if you want a simple, monolithic solution, or you can keep the two separate to enforce delineation between different web development roles."

Striking features

Silverlight integrates seamlessly with HTML and supports Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR), which allows both the designers and the development community to create their applications within the context of Microsoft .NET Framework and at the same time, integrate animations and graphics into their applications seamlessly. It would contain a cut-short Common Language Runtime (CLR) that can be assessed from the web browser. In a nutshell, you have the combination of the best of both worlds - the power of Microsoft .NET's managed, platform independent environment coupled with amazing graphics. So, what comes out is an awesome user experience. According to Nik Cubrilovic, "Silverlight isn't just animations in applets, far from it - it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web."

The usage of Silverlight facilitates the distribution of multimedia as an integral part of an application in full screen having a support for Partial High Definition (HD) video at 720p resolution. With the help of Microsoft’s new Dynamic Language Runtime (DRL), Silverlight also supports JavaScript, Python and Ruby within the context of Microsoft .NET Framework. Both Python and Ruby were introduced by Microsoft and released under a shared source license, providing developers with both access to the code and the capability to contribute to it.