Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework which is similar to adobe flash and is used to develop internet and mobile applications. Silverlight can be also used for making side bar gadgets for windows vista. Silverlight integrates animations, multimedia and graphics in a single working environment. Although adobe flash is much more popular as it is installed in about 95 percent of browsers, Microsoft Silverlight is also becoming popular because of its unique features. Silverlight requires an X 86 processor SSE (streaming SIMD extension) support. Intel Pentium 3 and up processors and AMD Athlon XP and up will support Microsoft Silverlight.

Evolution of silver light
" Silverlight 1.0 "" this was released in the year 2007 and was developed under the code name windows presentation foundation. It was responsible for the user input, interactivity ,animation and other controls, digital rights management and DOM integration
" Silverlight 2.0- it can execute any program written in .NET as it includes a version of. NET framework implemented in the Common language run time version
" Silverlight 3.0- Silverlight 3 was announced on 20th September 2008. Cyber world was anxiously waiting for its release and it was finally released on 9th July 2009. It offered more controls to users as compared to its earlier versions. Data pager was included for viewing paginated data along with many other features.
" Silverlight 4.0 "" Microsoft Silverlight 4.0 was released on 15th April 2010 along with Silverlight 4 tools for developers.it included new features like support of Google chrome browser , webcam and microphone , more mouse support , printing and notification system. Localization was made better with more easy controls and HTML rendering was supported
" Silverlight 5.0- it was released on 9th December 2011. It is the most recent version available. It included provision for 3D graphics, GPU accelerated video decoding, play back speed controls, remote control and 64 bit support. Multiple window support , In browser HTML support and Improved XAML parse times for User Controls were some of its additional features

Microsoft silver light is one of the most popular applications which are used for web and mobile application development. Let us now take a look of some of the advantages of silver light that made it this much popular

Advantages of silver light
" Microsoft Silverlight offers a cross domain support for the applications developed using Silverlight
" Plugins of Microsoft silver light are supported by xp and above operating systems
" It supports asynchronous call
" Java script can be integrated with Silverlight applications
" User interface is much better by the introduction of Microsoft silver light. Web enterprises applications and data base integration can be done in Microsoft Silverlight.
" Microsoft silver light offers integration with SharePoint server based applications
" A powerful IDE, the visual studio is incorporated in Microsoft silver light.