what is silverlight

many of my college friends does not know any thing about microsoft silverlight
whenever i talk about it they ask me what is this??? Is this a movie???
so today i am posting about silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications with emphasis on multimedia, animations, and graphics, with features and purposes similar to those of Adobe Flash. The run-time environment for Silverlight is available as a plug-in for most web browsers. 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 a new cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences and Rich Interactive Applications(RIA) for the web. It runs in all popular browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera. The plugin required to run Silverlight is very small in size hence gets installed very quickly.

The current version 4 was released in April 2010. It is compatible with multiple web browsers used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Mobile devices, starting with Windows Phone 7 and Symbian (Series 60) phones, are likely to become supported in 2010. A free software implementation named Moonlight, developed by Novell in cooperation with Microsoft, is available to bring most Silverlight functionality to Linux, FreeBSD and other open source platforms.

Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of Ajax. It also competes with Sun Microsystems' JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight.