
Silverlight Avoids Cross-Browser/OS Issuesįor most development teams, developing a website that will work identically with the popular browsers of the day (including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera) is a difficult proposition. I’ll do my best to lift the fog with these 10 things that you should know about Microsoft’s Silverlight.ġ. With so much Silverlight information available right now, it is difficult to distill what is important and what is hype. With the public release of Silverlight imminent, now is the right time to become familiar with Silverlight and how it might impact your Web application strategy. I’ve been using Silverlight since I taught a course for internal Microsoft developers, shortly before the software’s public unveiling as “WPF/E.” I’ve written several books about Microsoft-based software development (such as Pragmatic ADO.NET ), I co-wrote four Microsoft developer certification books, and I have invested quite a bit of time in examining the promises that the company is making for this “Flash killer.” It’s always hard to be critical of software that isn’t fully released yet (for one thing, it’s impossible to point out serious bugs since they may be addressed by the time you fire up the development tool), but the following reflects my professional and technical judgment based on several months of hands-on experience.
DO I NEED MICROSOFT SILVERLIGHT MAC OS
The Silverlight plug-in currently works with Internet Explorer and Firefox Web browsers on Windows and with Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X. The plug-in, currently available as a “Release Candidate” (which for all intents and purposes means it’s released now), enables rich application development including media, interactivity and animation. To ease that pain, Microsoft recently announced Silverlight, a cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for Web application developers. However, implementing that strategy with rich Internet applications (RIA) is not always as easy as it should be.

Crafting a Web strategy is important for any thriving business.
