What Is Microsoft Silverlight?

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Microsoft Silverlight is the multimedia framework you never knew you needed. Streaming video is great, but did you know Silverlight can help you build rich web applications with graphics and video? That's right: if you have a website, it doesn't matter you can use Microsoft Silverlight to make your site more dynamic. How does that work? Microsoft Silverlight is a plug-in for Internet Explorer (and several other browsers) that allows web developers to create richer web applications. What does that mean exactly? You can use Silverlight to add graphics and video to your site, interactivity like drag-and-drop functionality and more. Microsoft announced in 2012 that it would be ending support for Silverlight, so if you're still using it on any of your websites, you might want to rethink things soon! Microsoft Silverlight: The original streaming video platform. If you're a millennial, you probably remember when you had to rent a DVD from the local Blockbuster and watch it on your TV. If you were an early adopter, you might've even been lucky to rent a movie from Netflix or Blockbuster's online service. It wasn't until Microsoft Silverlight came along that streaming videos became a thing, and everyone was doing it! In 2007, Silverlight was released as an alternative to Adobe Flash for web developers. It allowed them to publish multimedia content on their websites as an alternative to Adobe Flash. Although it was intended as one of the development environments on Windows Phone, its best-known application is streaming video. Early versions of Netflix's and Amazon's streaming video services used Silverlight. Other notable uses included NBC's streaming of the 2008 Summer Olympics and 2010 Winter Olympics, as well as the 2008 Democratic and Republican conventions in the U.S. In May 2011, statowl. com estimated that Silverlight had a market penetration of around 64 percent.

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