[Ghostwalker]

Is Silverlight for designing websites or internet applications.

[matonga]

This looks as a hard-to-answer question to me.

Let's see:

- To my taste, SilverLight is the very late response from Microsoft to Adobe's Flash (Macromedia's Flash before) (and Shockwave a lot before).

- Wkipedia's article states "(...) programmable web browser plugin that enable features (...) that characterizes rich Internet applications".

- However, it seems you can write either Internet apps, standalone apps or even sidebar gadgets. It seems to be a "please use me anywhere it fits, baby" thing.

If I were to do a website with animations, online videos and stuff, I would go for Adobe Flash, it is already established and installed in almost every machine, even Linux ones.

If I were to write an Internet app, and would like something more dynamic and nice-looking than PHP, Ruby, etc... I would give SilverLight a try (maybe even PHP can be used as an XML data backend and business rules validation on data access, etc...).

[Ghostwalker]

Thanks for the reply, that is just about what I thought.

[Smaky]

I would add that Silverlight is much more than animations for the web. It started like that -as matonga states- trying to keep pase with adobe's flash and (nowadays) adobe air platform.

Being some sort of subset of WPF, silverlight anables much more business related applicatons and RIAs. Take a look at MSDN Magazine, there have been a few articles on that:

LOB Apps with Silverlight - Part 1
LOB Apps with Silverlight - Part 2
Silverlight Patterns

So I would tend to agree with matonga, If I only pursuing complex animation-like apps amd websites I would stick with flash... but if I would try to do more complex stuff like connection-aware RIA's I think Silverlight & Air are both something worth to take a look at.

[painkilleryusuf]

matonga, on Apr 5th 2009, 04:56 AM, said:

This looks as a hard-to-answer question to me.

Let's see:

- To my taste, SilverLight is the very late response from Microsoft to Adobe's Flash (Macromedia's Flash before) (and Shockwave a lot before).

- Wkipedia's article states "(...) programmable web browser plugin that enable features (...) that characterizes rich Internet applications".

- However, it seems you can write either Internet apps, standalone apps or even sidebar gadgets. It seems to be a "please use me anywhere it fits, baby" thing.

If I were to do a website with animations, online videos and stuff, I would go for Adobe Flash, it is already established and installed in almost every machine, even Linux ones.

If I were to write an Internet app, and would like something more dynamic and nice-looking than PHP, Ruby, etc... I would give SilverLight a try (maybe even PHP can be used as an XML data backend and business rules validation on data access, etc...).

That was really helpful bro.. I had no idea whatsoever about silverlight..

[holo13x]

silver light is suposed to be like the flash player for internet explorer 8, they sent it as an add-on but now, when u download IE8 (internet explorer 8) it comes with silverlight already istalled.