A platform from Microsoft for developing rich Internet applications for Windows and Mac. Silverlight was designed to compete with other multimedia platforms, including Adobe Flash/Flex, JavaFX and JavaScript. It is also used to create mobile apps for Windows Phone. In Silverlight development, the user interface is defined in the XAML markup language (see
XAML).
As a subset of Microsoft's .NET environment, Silverlight broadens the scope for .NET developers, allowing them to run their programs not only on Windows, but on the Mac, and via the Moonlight project, on Linux PCs as well. See
Moonlight and
.NET.
Delivered as a plug-in for Internet Explorer, Firefox and other Web browsers, Silverlight supports animation, vector graphics, MP3 and Windows Media formats including the VC-1 video codec. Silverlight programs can be written in Visual Basic, C#, Python and Ruby.
The Windows Interface - Everywhere
Code-named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E), Silverlight is the cross platform version of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) interface, first deployed in Windows Vista. See
VC-1,
RIA and
WPF.