Al-Sawad Report: Silverlight

Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash?

Now, web designers and developers can finish their works without a need for FLASH?!

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross platform, cross browser that enables designers and developers to build rich media experiences and RIAs for browsers. Currently support Firefox, Safari and IE browsers on both the Mac and Windows.

Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

It supports playback of WMV, WMA and MP3 media content across all supported browsers without requiring Windows Media Player, Windows Media Player ActiveX control or Windows Media browser plugins.

Silverlight 1.0

It is made up of the following components:

Input - handling input from devices like keyboard, mouse, stylus etc.
UI core - managing rendering of bitmap images (including compressed raster images like JPEG), vector graphics, text and animations.
Media - playback of MP3, WMA Standard, WMV7, WMV8 and WMV9/VC-1 streams.
XAML - to allow the UI layout to be created using XAML markup language.

( Sample of Silverlight game )

Silverlight 1.1

It includes a version of the .NET Framework, with the full Common Language Runtime as .NET Framework 3.0; so it can execute any .NET language including VB.NET and C# code.

( Sample of Silverlight Application )

Top Banana

Top Banana is a new starter kit that lets developers add sophisticated and streamlined video editing to their content sites. It lets their users easily upload and edit video snippets into movies in a fun and free-form manner. Top Banana application was built with C# and runs cross platform on any system where Silverlight is installed.

For an example of Silverlight, check the next 7 minute video: