Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft Corp. created Silverlight to help companies design, develop and deliver engaging, interactive user experiences for Web, desktop, and mobile applications when online or offline. Silverlight is a free plug-in, powered by the .NET framework and compatible with multiple browsers, devices and platforms, bringing a new level of interactivity to wherever the Web works.

On November 18, 2009, at the Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft Corp. unveiled a Beta version Silverlight 4. This latest version delivers hundreds of features and controls that, when combined with the continued innovation in Microsoft’s world-class tools for designers and developers — Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend – present the leading edge in rapid, powerful application development. With printing support, rich reporting and charting, and integration with back-end systems and server products including Microsoft SharePoint, Silverlight is ready for business.

Silverlight 4 delivers a full suite of powerful capabilities to business application developers, bringing the best-of-breed .NET platform to browser-based experiences. Silverlight provides an ideal platform for developing and deploying modern business applications for both customer facing and staff-facing applications.

• Business Application Development. Silverlight 4 consolidates its position as the natural choice for building business applications on the Web.
  
  New Features for Application Developers:
  • Comprehensive printing support enabling hardcopy reports and documents as well as a virtual print view, independent of screen content.
  • A full set of forms controls with over 60 customizable, styleable components. New controls include RichTextbox with hyperlinks, images and editing and Masked textbox for complex field validation. Enhanced controls include DataGrid with sortable/resizeable columns and copy/paste rows.
  • WCF RIA Services introduces enterprise class networking and data access for building n-tier applications including transactions, paging of data, WCF and HTTP enhancements.
  • Localization enhancements with Bi-Directional text, Right-to-Left support and complex scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and Thai and 30 new languages.
  • The .NET Common Runtime (CLR) now enables the same compiled code to be run on the desktop and Silverlight without change.
  • Enhanced databinding support increases flexibility and productivity through data grouping/editing and string formatting within bindings.
  • Managed Extensibility Framework now supports building large composite applications.
  • Exclusive tooling support for Silverlight, new in Visual Studio 2010. Including a full editable design surface, drag and drop data-binding, automatically bound controls, datasource selection, integration with Expression Blend styling resources, Silverlight project support and full intellisense.
    • Developer tools:
      • Fully editable design surface for drawing out controls and layouts.
      • Rich property grid and new editors for values.
      • Drag and drop support for databinding and automatically creating bound controls such as listbox, datagrid. New datasources window and picker.
      • Easy to pick styles and resources to make a good looking application based on designer resources built in Expression Blend.
      • Built in project support for Silverlight applications.
      • Editor with full intellisense for XAML and C# and VB languages.
• Empowering richer, more interactive experiences. Silverlight is already in use as a comprehensive platform for building rich experiences both for application and pure media scenarios including HD quality, interactive video through Smooth Streaming. Silverlight 4 introduces additional capabilities to enable creation of ever more rich, appealing high-performance interactive experiences and innovative media experiences:
  • Fluid interface enhancements advance application usability through animation effects.
  • Webcam and microphone to allow sharing of video and audio for instance for chat or customer service applications.
  • Audio and video local recording capabilities capture RAW video without requiring server interaction, enabling a wide range of end-user interaction and communication scenarios for example video conferencing.
  • Bring data in to your application with features such as copy and paste or drag and drop.
  • Long lists can now be scrolled effortlessly with the mouse wheel.
  • Support conventional desktop interaction models through new features such as right-click context menu.
  • Support for Google's Chrome browser.
  • Performance optimizations mean Silverlight 4 applications start quicker and run 200% faster than the equivalent Silverlight 3 application.
  • Multi-touch support enables a range of gestures and touch interactions to be integrated into user experiences.
  • Multicast networking enabling Enterprises to lower the cost of streaming broadcast events such as company meetings and training, interoperating seamlessly with existing Windows Media Server streaming infrastructure.
  • Content protection for H.264 media through Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady.
  • Output protection for audio/video streams allowing content owners or distributors to ensure protected content is only viewed through a secure video connection.
• Move beyond the browser. Silverlight 3 pioneered the delivery of a new class of Rich Internet Applications to work on the desktop without additional code or runtimes. Silverlight 4 extends this capability:
  • For Sandboxed applications
    • Place HTML within your application enabling much tighter integration with content from web servers such as email, help and reports.
    • Provide support for 'toast' notification windows allowing applications to communicate status or change information while the user is working on another application through a popup window on the taskbar.
    • Offline DRM extending the existing Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady technology to work offline. Protected content can be delivered with an embedded license so that users can go offline immediately and start enjoying their content.
    • Control over aspects of UI include window settings such as start position, size and chrome.
  • For Trusted applications
    • Read and write files to the user's MyDocuments, MyMusic, MyPictures and MyVideos folder (or equivalent for non-windows platforms) for example storage of media files and taking local copies of reports.
    • Run other desktop programs such as Office, for example requesting Outlook to send an email, send a report to Word or data to Excel.
    • COM automation enables access to devices and other system capabilities by calling into application components; for instance to access a USB security card reader.
    • A new user interface for requesting application privileges access outside the standard Silverlight sandbox.
    • Group policy objects allow organizations to tailor which applications may have elevated trust.
    • Full keyboard support in fullscreen mode richer kiosk and media applications.
    • Enhancements to networking allow cross-domain access without a security policy file.

Microsoft unveiled Silverlight 3, the most powerful platform for delivering rich internet applications (RIAs) and media experiences on the Web. Silverlight 3 is packed with over 50 new features including: support for new application types and business models; dramatic video quality and performance improvements that raise the bar for creating rich Internet experiences; and new features that dramatically improve developer productivity such as .NET RIA Services. Today, over 6 million .NET developers worldwide can use Silverlight to create cutting-edge RIAs.

Silverlight 3 includes major media enhancements such as out of browser support allowing your web application to work on the desktop for the first time; major graphics improvements including 3D graphics support and GPU acceleration; H.264 video support; and, many features to improve RIA development productivity. Also, in order to fully integrate all the .NET developer tools, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express will support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight. Some highlights of the brand new features found in Silverlight 3 include:

• Support for Higher Quality Video & Audio. With support for native H.264/Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline, Silverlight 3 brings rich, full-screen, stutter-free media experiences to the desktop. New and enhanced media features in Silverlight 3 include:
  • Live and on-demand true HD (720p+) Smooth Streaming. IIS Media Services (formerly IIS Media Pack), an integrated HTTP media delivery platform, features Smooth Streaming which dynamically detects and seamlessly switches, in real time, the video quality of a media file delivered to Silverlight based on local bandwidth and CPU conditions.
  • More format choice. In addition to native support for VC-1/WMA, Silverlight 3 now offers users native support for MPEG-4-based H.264/AAC Audio, enabling content distributors to deliver high-quality content to a wide variety of computers and devices.
  • True HD playback in full-screen. Leveraging graphics processor unit (GPU) hardware acceleration, Silverlight experiences can now be delivered in true full-screen HD (720p+).
  • Extensible media format support. With the new Raw AV pipeline, Silverlight can easily support a wide variety of third-party codecs. Audio and video can be decoded outside the runtime and rendered in Silverlight, extending format support beyond the native codecs.
  • Industry leading content protection. Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady Content Protection enables protected in-browser experiences using AES encryption or Windows Media DRM.
• Empowering Richer Experiences. Silverlight 3 contains new 3D graphics, animation features, hardware accelerated effects and text improvements that enable designers and developers to create next generation Web visuals, including:
  • Perspective 3D Graphics. Silverlight 3 allows developers and designers to apply content to a 3D plane. Users can rotate or scale live content in space without writing any additional code. Other effects include creating a queue in 3D and transitions.
  • Hardware acceleration. By leveraging the power of the graphics processor unit (GPU), the performance of full screen video and graphics is dramatically improved.
  • Pixel Shader effects. These software based effects include blur and drop shadow. In addition, you can also write your own effect. Effects can be applied to any graphical content. An example would be to make a button appear depressed on rollover you could use a drop shadow effect on the pressed visual state.
  • Bitmap Caching. Rendering performance of Silverlight 3 applications is improved by allowing you to cache your vector content, text and controls into bitmaps. These can then render far more quickly. This is very useful for background content; or for content which needs to move around or scale without change to its internal appearance.
  • New Bitmap API. With Silverlight 3, users can now write pixels to a bitmap. Thus, they can build a photo editor to do red eye correction, perform edits on scanned documents or create specials effects for cached bitmaps from elements on the screen.
  • Themed application support. Developers can now theme applications by applying styles to their Silverlight 3 applications and changing them at runtime. Additionally, developers can cascade styles by basing them on each other.
  • Animation Effects. Silverlight 3 provides new effects such as spring and bounce. These make animation more natural. Developers can also now develop their own mathematical functions to describe an animation.
  • Enhanced control skinning. Provides easier skinning capabilities by keeping a common set of controls external from an application. This allows for sharing of styles and control skins between different applications.
  • Improved text rendering & font support. Silverlight 3 allows for more efficient rendering and rapid animation of text. Applications also load faster by enabling the use of local fonts.
• Improving Rich Internet Application Productivity. New features include:
  • 60+ controls with source code : Silverlight 3 is packed with over 60 high-quality, fully skinnable and customizable out-of-the-box controls such as charting and media, new layout containers such as dock and viewbox, and controls such as autocomplete, treeview and datagrid. The source code can be recompiled or utilized as-is. We provide a new set of themes to give a polished look to your UI. Other additions include multiple selection in listbox controls, file save dialog making it easier to write files, and support for multiple page applications with navigation.
  • Deep Linking. Silverlight 3 includes support for deep linking, which enables bookmarking a page within a RIA.
  • Enhanced Data Support Silverlight 3 delivers:
    • Element to Element binding : UI designers use binding between two UI properties to create compelling UI experiences. Silverlight now enables property binding to CLR objects and other UI components via XAML, for instance binding a slider value to the volume control of a media player.
    • Data Forms. The Data Form control provides support for layout of fields, validation, updating and paging through data.
    • New features for data validation which automatically catch incorrect input and warn the user with built-in validation controls. These provide error UI and templates.
    • Support for business objects on both client and server with n-Tier data support. Easily load, sort, filter and page data with added support for working with data. Includes a new built-in CollectionView to perform a set of complex operations against server side data. A new set of RIA services supports these features on the server.
  • Improved performance, through:
    • Application library caching, which reduces the size of applications by caching framework on the client in order to improve rendering performance.
    • Enhanced Deep Zoom features that enables the use of tends of thousands of elements.
    • Binary XML allows communication with the server to be compressed, greatly increasing the speed at which data can be exchanged.
    • Local Connection This feature allows communication between two Silverlight applications on the client-side without incurring a server roundtrip : for instance a chart in one control can communicate with a datagrid in another.
• Out of Browser Capability. Silverlight 3 offers a new set of features for building light-weight, sandboxed companion experiences for the Web that run on the desktop. Silverlight out of browser allows websites to build even closer, persistent relationships with customers. It enables the application to be placed in a restricted store on the user’s machine; and then provide a link directly to it from the user’s desktop or start menu. This is all enabled within Silverlight 3 without any additional download of runtime or the need to write applications in a different way. An application can now be easily found on the user’s desktop or start menu, and launched with a single click. In addition, it can test if the network is connected, it can update itself, and can also have access to Isolated Storage. Taken together, these features represent a radical upgrade to the web experience:
  • Desktop shortcuts and start menu support – place an application on the desktop and be one click away from your customer.
  • Run outside of browser – no longer need the distraction of the browser chrome.
  • Safer, more secure, sandboxed – an application can be trusted without security warnings, keeping your customers safer.
  • Consumer friendly non-administrator install – applications are held in a cache and do not require any privileges to run.
  • Built in auto-update – an application will check for new versions on the server and update on launch.
  • Connectivity detection (in browser, out of browser) – can detect a loss of connection and then chose to cache users work until the reconnect.

Nothing. Silverlight 3 is a full superset of Silverlight 2. It is 100% compatible with Silverlight 2 applications and provides more powerful features and functionality. Silverlight 3 applications even benefit from improvements in media playback and performance characteristics of Silverlight 3 without any additional changes needed.

Yes.

In order to build Silverlight 3 content with Expression Blend, you should use Expression Blend 3 together with the Silverlight 3 SDK.

In order to build Silverlight 2 content with Visual Studio 2008, you should use Visual Studio 2008 SP1 together with the Microsoft Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 (which contains the Silverlight 2 SDK).

The Silverlight installer and tools for Designers and Developers can be found on the Tools page. The Silverlight community site is also a great resource for developers to find additional resources and get started.

Yes. The Macintosh version of Silverlight 2 has the same feature set found in the Windows version.

ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight are designed to be complementary technologies. Because Silverlight can talk to any AJAX application, both client-side and server-side, customers can enhance existing ASP.NET or ASP.NET AJAX applications by integrating Silverlight media experiences and RIAs into their Web applications. Conversely, ASP.NET AJAX can additionally be used to control Silverlight-based visualization of data or the delivery of rich experiences.

Silverlight provides a rich set of controls which you can use in your SharePoint site – see http://www.codeplex.com/SL4SP. Over time, Microsoft will provide more advanced support for building SharePoint sites using Silverlight.

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. Examples include:

• ASP.NET-based Web applications: Silverlight provides a rich UI front-end that, with a consistent programming model, adds support for richer interactivity, media, and audio.
• Microsoft SharePoint–based content: Silverlight offers the ability to create rich Web parts.
• Windows Live services: Silverlight offers the ability to consume services and APIs more effectively.

Microsoft recommends targeting the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) when building rich, immersive applications and experiences that can take full advantage of the Windows platform, including hardware acceleration, peripheral access, etc. Silverlight is meant be used for broad reach, interactive media content and browser-based rich interactive and high-performance applications and experiences.

For Silverlight-related forums, blogs, and community resources visit the Silverlight Support and Community page

Silverlight supports playback of WMDRM 10 and PlayReady-encrypted content. For protecting live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming content, only PlayReady encryption is supported.

No. Silverlight will only decrypt content with licenses issued by the PlayReady Server SDK. To maximize performance – both over the network, and in terms of minimizing the size and complexity of the plug-in itself, Silverlight DRM only has support for processing the new PlayReady license format. A consequence of this is that a PlayReady license server is needed to deliver all licenses to the Silverlight plug-in regardless of whether the content is encrypted using WM DRM or PlayReady.

No, Silverlight will only support online-connected playback scenarios.

It is possible to use the same PlayReady server to issue licenses for both Silverlight clients on Windows or Mac operating systems, as well as for PlayReady mobile devices.

Yes, PlayReady supports real-time encryption for live streams that can be delivered through Windows Media Services and IIS7 Smooth Streaming

Silverlight supports both silent and non-silent license acquisition, enabling custom data from the application to be passed to the license server. However, the LUI_URL license field is not supported by Silverlight. Application Authentication scenarios should be developed using the LicenseAcquirer API provided by Silverlight to build your own Custom License Acquisition.

Yes.

Failure to acquire or authenticate licenses will return errors to the Silverlight MediaElement object, as documented in the Silverlight SDK.

Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady is available through licensing of the PlayReady Server SDK. The PlayReady Server SDK is used to build both content encryption and license servers for Silverlight DRM on Windows® Server 2003 and 2008 (which must be licensed separately). The fees associated with licensing the PlayReady Server SDK are: a.) $30,000 for development of PlayReady encryption and license servers, and b.) either $30,000 for each PlayReady license server CPU deployed (There is no limit on the number of cores. The first CPU deployed is free.) or $1.00 per 1,000 licenses issued. There is no fee for deployment of PlayReady encryption servers. Content distributors who contract with an approved ASP for all PlayReady DRM services are not subject to these licenses and fees.

Silverlight DRM also benefits from the established Microsoft DRM breach response process which includes dedicated monitoring for new breaches, guaranteed response times to breaches, and expedient renewability. If a Silverlight DRM plug-in is breached, Microsoft will update the Silverlight DRM plug-in to ensure content protection remains effective.

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform (Mac OS, Windows and Linux) and cross-device browser plug-in that helps companies design, develop and deliver applications and experiences on the Web. Installed as a free browser plug-in approximately 4MB in size, in less than 10 seconds, Silverlight enables a new class of rich, safe, secure and scalable cross-platform experiences.

Silverlight harnesses the power of .NET and includes over 100 controls, rich layout and styling, a powerful networking stack, data access, support for HD video, and much, much more.

Silverlight installation is fast and effortless for customers on both Mac OS, Linux and Windows platforms today.

Yes, Microsoft has made the Silverlight browser plug-in freely available for all supported platforms and browsers.

Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, and IronPython, and integrates with existing Web applications. By using Expression Studio and Visual Studio, designers and developers can collaborate more effectively using the skills they have today to light up the Web of tomorrow. By leveraging Silverlight's support for .NET, High Definition video, cost-effective advanced streaming, unparalleled high-resolution interactivity with Deep Zoom technology, and controls, businesses can reach out to new markets across the Web, desktop, and devices.

Silverlight will support all major browsers on both Mac OS X, Linux and on Windows. Particular care is being taken to account for differences in platform and browser capabilities to ensure a consistent experience including experiences on Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

Microsoft designed Silverlight with the ability to deliver high-fidelity experiences on the broadest set of system configurations. Some features, such as HD video, may benefit from the power contained in newer personal computers.

Device support is coming soon.

Verify your installation by visiting the Silverlight installation page.

The Silverlight Deployment Guide thoroughly details all the steps for rolling out Silverlight on a corporate network.

The system requirements for Microsoft Silverlight and associated technologies are listed below.

• Windows
  • Operating System: Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 2
  • Intel® Pentium® III 450MHz or faster processor (or equivalent)
  • 128MB of RAM
• Mac OS
  • Operating System: Apple Mac OS X 10.4.8 or above
  • Intel Core™ Duo 1.83GHz or faster processor
  • 128MB of RAM
• Linux. For the system requirements, please refer to the Mono Project's Moonlight Web site.

As you review Microsoft Silverlight, please feel free to consult any of the many additional resources provided. More information can be found at the following locations:

• Microsoft Silverlight Home Page
• Microsoft Expression Home Page
• MSDN Developer Center
• Microsoft Silverlight Community