Silverlight is Microsoft’s alternative to Flash. It is designed with the similar goal of enabling rich, desktop-like applications, enabling web applications to provide a scaled-down .NET experience within the browser, in a sandboxed environment. Technically, Silverlight applications can be developed in any .NET-compliant language from C# to Python, although C# is by far the most common.
It’s a competitor product to both the Adobe Macromedia Flash player and Apple QuickTime player. It is based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and can be integrated with existing Web infrastructure and applications, including Apache and PHP, JavaScript and XHTML on the client. By using this product, designers are able to prepare media for encoding and distribution, and create W3C standards-compliant sites.
The technology is a cross browser, cross platform implementation of the .NET Framework for developing and producing the next generation of media experiences and RIA (rich interactive applications) for the Web. Developers can also create Silverlight applications that run outside of the browser on your desktop. Finally, developers use the Silverlight framework to build applications for Windows Phone. It uses the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) to ease UI development (e.g. controls, animations, graphics, layout, etc.) while using managed code or dynamic languages for application logic.
