Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework that provides functionalities similar to those in Adobe Flash, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. Initially released as a video streaming plugin, later versions brought additional interactivity features and support for CLI languages and development tools. The current version 4 was released to developers on April 12, 2010, and the end-user runtime was released on April 15, 2010.[3]
It is compatible with multiple web browser products used on Microsoft Windows, Linux (using Novell Moonlight), and Mac OS X operating systems. Mobile devices, starting with Windows Phone 7 and Symbian (Series 60) phones, will likely become supported in 2010.[4][5] A free software implementation named Moonlight, developed by Novell in cooperation with Microsoft, is available to bring compatible functionality to Linux, FreeBSD and other open source platforms.
