Silver light is a product from the technology giant Microsoft. When we access a browser, the basic mechanism that is applied behind it is that every time the client or the web browser requests a page to the web server, the web server sends the respective web page. Such web pages often contain applications that can be run only if a certain kind of software is installed in the computer. This particular software is called a plug-in. A plug-in is the software that helps the running of various applications on a webpage. The Adobe Flash is an example of such a plug-in. Silver light is also a plug-in that has been developed by Microsoft in order to run specific application on the web browser.
Silver light was introduced as a run-time environment plug-in for applications that could have audio, video, textual or other graphical or non-graphical properties. The first version of this software was introduced in mid 2007 and was at its most basic stage. They were used for supporting multimedia and graphical applications. It also supported, streaming of media and animation applications. The developers of this oldest version had even built this software to support CLI Languages and other tools.
Over the years, Microsoft has released newer and more developed versions of Silver light. The latest version, Silverlight-4 was released in the month of April in 2010. Microsoft is gearing up to introduce its 5th installment in 2011. The development of this software has closely followed the Windows Presentation Foundation. As it was developed, the newer versions were capable of running advanced graphical, animated and other applications. It is built into a single environment. The language that is used to program or encode this software is the widely known XAML or the Extensible Markup Language and the network framework that it is based upon is the.NET Framework that is used for most web applications. Many people are unaware of the fact that Silver light has the ability to create application software's of Microsoft, such as the Windows Sidebar gadgets or Vista.
Silver light has an all-round support property. It is capable of running videos with various extensions. It supports both Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV)along with the files with a.MP3 extension as well. It does not require any additional plug-ins to run such files. It is capable of supporting them in itself. The first two versions do not support VC-1 and H.264. These file formats are supported by Silverlight-3 and above versions of this software. XML documents can also be run on this software environment through DOM or Document Object Model.
The Silver light software is armed with its own downloader that helps downloading text documents, media files depending on the requirements of the apps on a web browser. The Silverlight-2 and above versions can be encoded in.NET language or other languages, for example Iron Ruby. Novell, with cooperation from Microsoft as well has developed the open source for Silver light and christened it Moonlight in order to be able to run it in open source environments like UNIX, LINUX etc. Silver light can be run on MAC operating system, and phones with Windows 7 or Symbian Operating System. However these features are available in Silverlight-4 only. This software is supported by Windows-XP and below (versions-1, 2, 3 and 4), on Internet-6 and in Internet-7 for Windows Vista and Windows 7, Google, Mozilla Firefox, Opera etc.
Cathy Brown is a well known writer for software development services. Presently, she is writing on Silverlight Development, Silverlight Development Services, Silverlight outsourcing services for http://www.otssolutions.com/
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