Microsoft Silverlight 4 is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback that characterizes rich Internet applications. Version 2.0, released October 2008, brought additional interactivity features and support for .NET languages and development tools.
It is compatible with multiple web browser products used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Mobile devices, starting with Windows Mobile 6 and Symbian (Series 60) phones, will also be supported. A third-party free software implementation named Moonlight is under development to bring compatible functionality to GNU/Linux.
Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation, and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in XAML and programmed using a subset of the .NET Framework. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations. Textual content created with Silverlight is searchable and indexable by search engines as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML).Silverlight can also be used to create Windows Sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista.
Recomended route to becomming a Silverlight Developer
- Learn a programming language c#. This training course will introduce variables, conditional and loop structures, classes, inheritance, exception handling, creating reusable components and data services
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Learn the basics of ASP.Net Web Development. This training course will introduce server controls, ASPX pages, user controls, JavaScript, Ajax, Silverlight, Expression Blend, ADO.Net, State Management, Authentication, Configuartion and deployment.
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Learn Silverlight, XAML layout, controls, event handling, templates, styles, data binding
- Learn whats new in Silverlight 3.0