Microsoft Silverlight
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| Developer(s) | Microsoft Corporation |
|---|---|
| Initial release | September 5, 2007 |
| Stable release | 5.1.50901.0(October 11, 2016) |
| Preview release | None |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Symbian OS |
| Platform | Intel x86 32-bit and x86-64 |
| Type | Application framework, run-time environment, and multimedia framework |
| License | Freeware |
| Website | www |
Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, similar to Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is available for some 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 also one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages that use Silverlight cannot run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there is no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms.
Microsoft announced the end of life of Silverlight 5 in 2012. In 2013, Microsoft announced that they had ceased development of Silverlight except for patches and bugfixes. Microsoft has set the support end date for Silverlight 5 to be October 2021. Silverlight is no longer supported in Google Chrome since September 2015. Since Microsoft Edge does not support plugins, it also does not support Silverlight.
Silverlight was used to provide video streaming for the NBC coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and the 2008 conventions for both major United States political parties. Silverlight is also used by Amazon Video and Netflix for their instant video streaming services, but Netflix said in its Tech Blog in 2013 that, since Microsoft had announced the end of life, they would be moving to HTML5 video.
Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations, and interactivity into a single run-time environment. In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) and programmed using a subset of the .NET Framework. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations. Silverlight can also be used to create Windows Sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista.
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