Silverlight News & Articles

Silverlight was Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash, an application framework with which to build rich internet applications. It was launched in April 2007 to much fanfare, albeit mainly from Microsoft. Version 5 brought GPU accelerated video decoding and 64-bit support in December of last year. It also brought the conclusion of the Silverlight story, as this version is set to be the final release. Silverlight is no more. Or so people have been speculating, as there has yet to be any official word from Microsoft. Its lifespan might be prolonged as a Windows Phone platform, but it seems likely it will cease to exist as a browser plugin.

However this article is not about SIlverlight per se, but rather its somewhat fractured relationship with SharePoint. If we have really seen the final installment of Silverlight, what does that mean for its use with SharePoint in the future? Let’s start by seeing how it is used today.

As widely discussed last month, Flash has already been squeezed out of the front end of the mobile experience. Now here comes Silverlight to try to fix its place among developers' favorite framework tools, but will its place at the front of sites be relevant for long?

With Adobe quitting Flash development for mobile, it looks like Microsoft could give up on Silverlight too, leaving users with no more "incompatible browser" messages and giving developers just one standard to focus on.

Microsoft's (news, site) Windows Phone 7 hasn't exactly gotten off to a rocking start and it'll take a while for the Nokia deal to bear fruit. So, what are the phone developers doing to make things better now?

The MIX11 conference spans three days and on the first two days it is kicked off by a 2 hour keynote where Microsoft have the opportunity to gather all the attendees in one room and deliver their message of choice. Yesterday was all about web technology. My expectations of massive Windows Phone, Silverlight and Windows Azure exposure turned out to be completely off. Windows Azure got very little attention and neither Silverlight nor Windows Phone was mentioned.

The second day’s keynote somewhat restored my confidence in my ability to predict what Microsoft wants to communicate to the developer community -- it was almost two hours exclusively dedicated to Silverlight and especially Windows Phone.

Microsoft (news, site) adds new powers to Silverlight, as it unveils a new version that helps play content happily on iPads and Windows Phone 7, bringing high class visuals and interactivity to your apps and data.

The video, drag-n-drop, canvas and other features promised by HTML5 have drawn much attention, but it's not yet appropriate to build websites against the emerging standard, W3C official cautions. Separately, privacy experts point to open concerns.

The latest release of Sitefinity Web CMS (news, site) -- 4.0. beta -- adds productivity and ease of use improvements, plus an SDK as part of a ground-up rebuild of the ASP.NET CMS.

While much was made about the release of Office 2010 in May, the announcement that Microsoft intends to make an Office release for Mac in October has been relatively quiet. Also this week there has been a number of releases that aim to make PDF conversion much easier.

All kinds of good stuff coming out of Microsoft these days. Among them is the final release of ASP.NET MVC 2 and the Release Candidate for Silverlight 4.

How would you all—including non-techies—like to be able to track how users interact with your Silverlight content? Well, now you can. Google Analytics has officially integrated into the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework.  

Do you remember Seesmic (news, site)? They’re the company that’s got that cool Tweetdeck alternative with social media marketing perks. Now their revamped Web application is aiming high as well, and features threaded Twitter conversations, a contact manager and drag and drop list creation. 

While the release date of KnowledgeLake’s (news, site) Imaging for SharePoint (IFS) only four days before Christmas may seem odd, the company explains that it did it so that customers would be able to use the new features straight away.

So it's day 2 of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2009 and what we have all been waiting for has happened. Microsoft has announced the beta release of SharePoint 2010 to the world.

Everyone, it seems, is questioning the future of the Web Content Management market. But question they may, Web CMS vendors across the global are still working hard to advance their solutions, and Bulgaria based Telerik (news, site) is no exception.

They have recently announced their Q3 Release lineup and it's packed with new features that include support for SQL Azure, User Interface testing and ASP.NET MVC and much more.