The new silverlight technology
Silverlight was released in the last couple years from Microsoft as a technology to allow running .Net based applications on the web. This is accomplished via a browser plugin. Silverlight supports a subset of the full .net framework, but more importantly it also supports a subset of the XAML specification for user interface. Xaml is the xml based UI markup language used in other Microsoft .Net technologies, especially the Windows presentation foundation framework, aka WPF.
Although Silverlight still trails Adobe Flash in popularity, the technology is catching on rapidly. This is likely due to newer versions of the framework are being released which show maturing in the technology. Silverlight version 4 will be released within a couple months, and should be part of the upcoming visual studio 2010 release. Each silverlight version has shown marked improvement compared to the one prior to it.
Microsoft developers have taken to the tech rapidly. This is likely due to the fact that MS devs are able to reuse much of their .net programming experience from other MS based development technologies within the silverlight framework. For example, C# and VB.Net base languages are supported, althought they can only use a specific subset of the larger .net framework. Many microsoft specific technology developers have been hesitant to learn to program Adobe flash, because it is a hassle to have to learn a completely new technology that is not compatable with their existing skillset. Now with Silverlight, they have alternative options for building rich internet applications with a mimimum of learning curve.
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