Microsoft player for the browser is lacking many important features since its first release and on the other hand its competitor Flash is offering these features from several years. Infect version 1.0 was a slightly more than a beta release but a lot of improvements has been seen in current release. However the truth is that it still behind Flash standard because of lacking many advanced capabilities; Microsoft has to work hard to compete with Adobe Flash Player.
Microsoft introduces Silverlight with a promise to put Microsoft player on a nearly level with adobe’s Flash Framework. Silverlight delivers an amazing amount of improvements to the table with new APIs, audio codecs and capabilities for video like Smooth Streaming, H264, AAC and hardware based graphic acceleration.
With a developer point of view, this is still a question that how easy it is to develop in Silverlight and how much Microsoft is able to close the features breach with Adobe’s Flash Platform? In its true spirit, Silverlight is designed to make development process easy as it is Microsoft Well known strategy which clearly reflects from the development of IDE to the massive load of new APIs of Silverlight. However it is a bitter fact that web developers’ community remains suspicious about Silverlight’s primary development environment and still not sure about it.
For a novice developer, understanding of Microsoft .Net platform can be quite a bit tricky than usual web development tools like JavaScript or ActionScript which empowers Adobe’s Flash platform. However Silverlight is not so complicated, you will be happy to listen that it is probably a bit easier one from Microsoft and certainly you don’t need to be a .Net expert to build a Silverlight application. How wonder it is?
If your underlying platform is .Net Framework, then it is obvious that Silverlight is providing more strong programming utilities than a typical Flash developer is capable to access. The primary IDE for Silverlight, Visual Studio 2008, waives out Adobe’s Flash IDE and of course with the availability of tools like Eclipse, a lot of Flash developers have been already shifted towards such tools.
Remember there is also Eclipse plug-ins available for working with Silver light and believe me its amazing!
Silverlight applications can be developed with any programming language from C++ to Python. The amazing thing about Silverlight is that you are now able to get access to real programming languages. Although developers are capable of creating powerful application using ActionScript but even though Flash and Flex Framework are lacking the sophistication and maturity for which .Net Framework has achieved a great respect within Developers community.
You can create a Silverlight application that detached from your browser just like an ordinary download but you will need to make your own interface and call the Detach () function on the application type or you have to look for the documentations for this purpose.
Finally Silverlight’s most important new feature is its new out-of-browser functionalities. With the rapid development foundation of .Net Framework, It should be expected to see an explosion of desktop Silverlight applications once it will be out from its beta phase. You can expect much more but still it is silent knock!
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