Silverlight is a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web - in short, a competitor to Flash. It also contains a compact CLR (Common Language Runtime), allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it. Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.

Silverlight has a very strong hand in the area of online video. It has traditionally been associated with Flash, and most users are familiar with the constraints that such video has such as quality levels and full-screen viewing. Using Silverlight you can distribute multimedia as part of the application at quality levels up to 720p (high definition) and also in native full screen (not just a maximized browser screen).

Silverlight supports the ability to progressively download and play media content from any web-server. You can point Silverlight at any URL containing video/audio media content, and it will download it and enable you to play it within the browser.  No special server software is required, and Silverlight can work with any web-server (including Apache on Linux).

As with all Silverlight applications, video can be streamed down through IE, Firefox or Safari on both Windows and Mac OSX. If an application is doing just video and audio and doesn’t require the rest of the Silverlight CLR functionality, then the total download including the codecs required to play the stream will be around 2MB.

The service called Silverlight Streaming allows users and developers to host their Silverlight content and apps with Microsoft, taking advantage of their extensive global network of data centres and their content delivery network. It allows users to upload up to 4GB of content, and to stream up to 1 million minutes of online video delivery at 700kbps, around DVD quality.

Silverlight enables you to create rich UI and animations, and blend vector graphics with HTML to create compelling content experiences, and would therefore provide a great aid in web development.  It supports a Javascript programming model to develop these.  One benefit of this is that it makes it really easy to integrate these experiences within AJAX web-pages (since you can write Javascript code to update both the HTML and XAML elements together).

The flexibility and scalability of Silverlight is powerful enough to entertain as well as interact with web users well into the foreseeable future. Silverlight’s strengths will become glaringly apparent over the next year or two as hyper-rich media and more compelling web experiences are demanded by users all over the world. Silverlight is ready for it right now.