Emerging Technologies in New Media

Silverlight

Silverlight[1] is an application that is cross platform and cross browser plug-in. It’s a new technology to help deliver the next generation of media of .NET and interactive applications. Its plug-in is small and light and is very quickly to install. It supports many programming modules such as Ruby and Ajax also can run on the major browsers from Windows to Mac OS. Silverlight is safe, secure ,rich and scalable for platform experiences Silver light earlier name was WPF/E or Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere; however silver light is a more web-based subset of WPF that enables Flash-like web and mobile applications. Silverlight has three versions Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 2 and it new one Silverlight 3 which came out July of this year. They all have the same aspects only one has an advantage of the other e.g. Silverlight three has the same fully function superset of two only Silverlight three benefit a bit more with a update application so to help run higher quality videos, have more format choice, has newer 3D graphics and so on. Silverlight is also free to download just so like Flash (adobe)[2] and Java.

 Silverlight vs. Flash

The differences between the Silverlight and Flash

1. Is easily distributed. Flash currently has an in-browser installer where you don’t have to restart your browser and can refresh the web page once it’s installed. Silverlight has a downloadable installer, which you have to kick off and then restart your browser

2. Is easily developed for. Currently, flash can integrate with multiple platforms and languages. Silverlight appears to be geared towards .Net developers, but looks like it has the flexibility to connect to multiple other languages and platforms.

3. Can integrate design objects easily. The Adobe suite of products, especially CS3, can easily share objects and files between applications (Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc.). Silverlight has these options built into it already along with several other tempting products such as ad-insertion and free streaming solutions.

4.Can be easily indexed. This is really the kicker that Flash does not do well right now, except for hacks or duplicate efforts. Silverlight is trying to address this problem and I think this might make it the winner in terms of SEO efforts.

5. Can win over the design community. This is another key area that Microsoft is going to have to win over. Design and Microsoft are two things that traditionally do not go together at all. Typically, the programmers are over on the .Net side and the designers are over on the Adobe side, typically on a Mac.

External Links

The negative things about Silverlight

• Sliverlight doesn’t have LINUX Platform Compatibility.
Doesn’t have Linux OS support only with moonlight.

code versions are supported on Intel-based Macs only

You can use it as a windows only mobile Application support.
Silverlight component is usually larger it uses XAML which is non-compressed.
Sliverlight doesn’t support playback of WAV files because .NET has very little audio playback support.
The ability to utilize the microphone or camera on a user's desktop. You need to use ActiveX control and building a Javascript bridge that could execute methods on the ActiveX control.
Silverlight supports only PNG, JPEG file formats, Gif from 1997 and upwards. Some other file formats are supported by Silverlight but in a limited way
It is possible to import artwork from Photoshop or Illustrator in to Expression Design but that’s about it. Expression Design then “transforms” the artwork to XAML.
Companies aren’t about to pay good money to train their designer into another program in design.
Stay in vector.
It doesn’t have full on support for 3D meshes.
Do little animations in zune.
The compression is in a zip file format called XAP so anyone can unzip it. When you buy a component from a third party developer and add that to your application, the components are completely exposed. There is no encrypting.
Indexed by search engines as its text can be read and accessed separately.
They have 3 versions out very quickly so people think that there will be a lot of mistakes being made and quality suffers all in the name of $.
A lot of people were saying that the code in XAML and C# is very long winded and it much simpler in flex.
There is no use of CSS they made their own language. In CSS style will go to every button for instance but with XAML you have to tell every button to use the style.
It says that sliverlight has penetration at 34% but I don’t think so as I and other I spoke too hadn’t heard of it.

http://www.lakelandug.net/Blog/tabid/65/EntryId/9/Silverlight-a-black-eye-for-Netflix-or-Netflix-a-black-eye-for-Silverlight.aspx