Silverlight 2 Previewed

The Silverlight 2 platform and supporting tools received a beta 2 release in June 2008. Silverlight, like Adobe’s Flash, is a platform for rich Internet applications (RIAs), interactive graphical applications delivered over the Web and run in a browser plug-in. The previewed technologies could substantially enhance the usefulness of Silverlight for corporate and commercial applications.

A Better Application Platform

RIAs look attractive for organizations doing custom development or commercial developers delivering applications over the Web, because they require no local application installation on the client but potentially provide better performance (especially graphics performance) and simpler programming than conventional Web applications. Silverlight 1, the current version, has been largely confined to delivery of interactive video due to limitations of its plug-in and JavaScript programming interfaces.

Silverlight 2 could prove a much more useful platform than the current version for corporate and commercial RIAs. It will employ a plug-in that runs a subset of Microsoft’s .NET Framework application platform. This enables programming in languages such as C# and Visual Basic that are more familiar to corporate developers and better supported by Microsoft’s tools than JavaScript. Silverlight 2 also will support important application capabilities such as the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) data access interface, data storage in files on the client (with user permission) to support offline applications, and access to data in Web services.