The new Microsoft Silverlight application is commonly referred to as Microsoft's version of Adobe Flash. While this may be a prevailing idea today, this is simply not the case. Silverlight does offer rich application capabilities, and has accompanying development tools for both designers and software developers, much like Flash, however Silverlight offers much more. Silverlight allows you to develop web applications every bit as rich and robust as their desktop brethren. In addition to the rich media and cross-platform capabilities the managed code model, in combination with the web service connectivity, provides developers with a tool to develop a desktop end-user experience delivered through a browser.

Cross-platform user experiences

• Ability to develop rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web that incorporate video, animation, and interactivity.
• Seamless and fast installation for users, due to an on-demand and easy-to-install plug-in under 2 megabytes (MB) in size. This plug-in works with all leading browsers.
• Consistent experiences between Internet Explorer, FireFox and Safari without any additional installation requirements.
• Vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays that enable seamless integration of graphics and effects into any existing Web application.

Flexible programming model with modern tools

• Based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and is subset of WPF (Windows Presentation Framework).
• Integration with existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP, as well as JavaScript and XHTML on the client.
• Choice of development languages including JavaScript, Ruby, Python, C#, Visual Basic .NET, and more.
• Support for common protocols like LINQ and LINQ-to-XML , JSON, RSS, POX, and REST.