Microsoft Silverlight has had an interesting and fluctuating history. Starting out, not very many people paid attention to Silverlight. There were many who believed it was going to be Microsoft’s feeble attempt to compete with Flash. A couple of years later, with Silverlight going into 3.0 things couldn’t be going better. They could, but still Silverlight’s performance is to be commended.

Partnering with different venues, and bringing events like the Olympics, NCAA March Madness online solidified Silverlight’s status as a true player. The question now is, with 3.0 can Microsoft continue the trend?

Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 has some improvements that you should be keeping an eye on. First, is that 3-D support can now be offloaded to a GPU and help provide smoother execution. Also, with Silverlight 3.0 apps can be used outside of a browser. This is probably its greatest addition as the possibilities of Silverlight can only grow with more options provided to developers.

Microsoft has also implemented a new technology called ‘Smooth Streaming’. Coupled with Silverlight, Smooth Streaming is an automated compression system that will play video streams as the maximum allowance by the device and bandwidth.

It’s safe to say that Silverlight is definitely moving in the right direction. It’s not quite up to Flash numbers yet in terms of penetration, but it’s getting there.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.