Introducing Silverlight

Silverlight is a fast growing and powerful technology used to build rich Internet applications (RIA). For those new to the concept, RIAs are web applications with the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. While traditional web applications consist of both server side and client side processing, server side processing is more dominant, and a typical website involves a lot of postbacks to the server. Even though there has been an effort to improve this experience through client side scripting and AJAX, the experience cannot be compared to a traditional desktop experience. Rich Internet applications move more of the processing, especially the rendering part, to the client side, thereby drastically reducing postbacks done to the server and vastly improving the user experience. Server side processing still occurs mostly in the form of calls to web/Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services.

The following are the benefits of RIAs:

• Improved user experience

• Reduced load on server with more processing done on the client side

• Reduced network traffic

However, there are also some disadvantages of the RIAs:

• Need to download entire script/package first before the processing on the client side can start, which may cause a wait time for users

• Loss of ability for search engines to index content of RIAs

• Dependence on client system security to access system resources may cause the application to fail in case users have restricted the permissions on their system

Silverlight can be considered a subset of another Microsoft technology called as the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF). Microsoft created WPF as the next generation of user interface technology for desktop applications. WPF is based on vector graphics and user Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), which is a form of XML. The earliest version of Silverlight is 1.0 and was first called WPF/E or Windows Presentation Framework/Everywhere.