Microsoft Silverlight

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Microsoft Silverlight, previously known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere, is Microsoft's flagship cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime for developing rich interactive applications such as graphics, animations and video playback. Silverlight extends the web development technique beyond the limitations of traditional HTML or JavaScript.

History

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. By Microsoft's description, Silverlight has these features:

1. Compelling Cross-Platform User Experiences
2. Flexible programming model with collaborative tools
3. Efficient, lower-cost delivery, and more capable media solution
4. Connected to Web, servers, and services

The first edition Silverlight 1.0 has been released on September, 2007, which is the first milestone for Microsoft's ambition on rich internet media. However, the limitation is still there. Because JavaScript is not flexible enough, so Microsoft proposed Silverlight 1.0 Alpha later. In November, 2007 Microsoft announced that they are renaming Silverlight 1.1 to Silverlight 2.0. Silverlight version 2 (currently available as an beta version) supports languages other than JavaScript, including .NET Framework languages such as C# and Visual Basic.

Technical Perspective

Why Silverlight Is Important?

Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications. It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy.

Examples

How to make an animation using Silverlight?

Creating an animation in Silverlight is different from flash. The first step to animate an object in Silverlight is to create a Storyboard. Storyboard is an object in Silverlight which controls animations with a timeline. It is equipped with interactive methods to start, stop, pause and resume an animation. There are several type of animations in Silverlight. DoubleAnimation, ColorAnimation, and PointAnimation are the basic type of animations.

DoubleAnimation animates the value of a double property between two target values using linear interpolation over a specified duration. An example of DoubleAnimation is the type of animation which makes use of the opacity property of the object, since opacity property is of type double.

ColorAnimation animates the value of a color property between two target values using linear interpolation over a specified duration. This type of animation is used to animate the colors of its objects.

PointAnimation animates the value of a point property between two target values using linear interpolation over a specified duration. An animation that moves objects or enlarges objects is the type of animation which falls into PointAnimation category.

The more advance types of animations in Silverlight incorporate a set of KeyFrames. DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames, ColorAnimationUsingKeyFrames, PointAnimationUsingKeyFrames, and ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames are the advance types of animations. Each of these types of animations animates the value of its object property (such as double, point, color, and object) along with a set of KeyFrames over a specified duration.