Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date

Chapter 3. Getting Started with Silverlight 2

Some people say Microsoft’s Silverlight technology is a “Flash killer,” but I’m not sure that I agree. The similarities are striking. Both Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) and Silverlight are browser plug-ins. Both support vector graphics, audio and video playback, animations, and scripting support. But their underlying technologies are different; Flash uses a semi-open binary format, and Silverlight is based on WPF. Before it was called Silverlight, the technology was code-named WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). And thanks to good browser support, Silverlight does really run everywhere, at least in theory.

At the time of this writing, Silverlight plug-ins are available for the two big players, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on Windows. Also, a Mac OS X plug-in exists that targets Safari and Mozilla Firefox on the Apple platform. According to Microsoft, other platforms were considered, but given the high market shares of Windows and Mac OS X, these browsers were given priority.

Silverlight 2 requires Windows 2004 SP4 or higher (i.e., Windows XP, Vista, Server 2008) to run. Opera support is planned for a future release; Opera is currently the third most used browser and has a relatively small but very loyal user base. However, since the Opera browser supports the same plug-in API as all successors of the Netscape browsers (i.e., Firefox and other Mozilla browsers), Silverlight 2 works there as well, ...