The Microsoft Stack: What Silverlight Means to You

By Patrick Hynds

May 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)

Most IT managers have likely heard the term Silverlight, but unless they are better informed on development technologies than the average development manager, they don’t know what it means.

The most common short answer to the question of “What is Silverlight?” is that it is Microsoft’s version of Flash. While this is probably a good place to start, it is a misleading place to end. Sometime in the last few years, Microsoft realized that cross-platform compatibility has to be part of their repertoire, and we have begun to see Microsoft work to achieve that in the myriad places it plays. Silverlight is, in my opinion, the best of these moves because it promises to bring to rich Internet applications (RIA) the kind of competition that drove the browser innovations of the last decade.

First, let me explain what the Silverlight technology represents and how it can be leveraged. Almost all of Microsoft’s considerable development tools target the Windows OS, with the occasional tip of the hat to Mac OS X. The strategy is that if developers are building applications for your platform, and they are happy with the high-productivity tools, then the consumers and businesses will be hard-pressed to buy other, less well-served platforms.

What this strategy has ignored is that the world is a multiplatform place and organizations and individuals often swim in multiplatform pools. Mac is currently the most visible of these alternatives. There is a perception by many, even devoted Microsoft fans, that Apple has really got the hardware right. Scores of people in my immediate circle run Microsoft operating systems on Apple hardware.

There are really three choices for the broad types of applications that can be built (maybe this is a gross simplification, but for the purposes of the topic you will see that it is an appropriate characterization). The standard native client is the original type, most often written in C++ and requiring deployment on the client system. The advantage here is that the application can bring the full weight and power of the client to bear on the user experience.

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