Silverlight is a recent technology from Microsoft which promises to make websites more dynamic and interactive – and possibly significantly easier to develop. This page presents a brief introduction to Silverlight, and links to further information.

Silverlight is a browser plug-in created by Microsoft which provides a new way to present information within the browser. In this regard SilverLight is like Flash – the browser window is replaced with the SilverLight plug-in, and HTML is not used.

But Silverlight isn’t really intended for general web-sites – HTML already handles normal web pages well. SilverLight is intended for pages which need high levels of interactivity – for example, a page where you’re trying to find the best flight between two cities (see demo here).

If Silverlight doesn’t use HTML, how does it work? Like Flash, Silverlight content needs to be created by programmers and designers. However, unlike Flash, SilverLight uses a cut-down version of the C# programming language that Windows developers are already familiar with (Flash programming is generally considered quite specialist and a little tricky for most developers to learn).

The primary benefit of Silverlight is that creating rich, interactive websites should get a lot easier – and hence cheaper.

The current approach, which uses the browser language JavaScript, is complex and requires highly trained developers.

We expect Silverlight to be much easier to use, and to be accessible to less expert developers. Silverlight websites will require significantly less testing, because there should be no differences between browsers. Taken together, we believe that these benefits may mean a 2 or 3 times reduction in development cost for Silverlight sites compared with AJAX.

If this expectation is met, we expect there will be a very rapid adoption of Silverlight for many online systems – there are few companies who can afford to ignore such a cost saving.

Silverlight has one major disadvantage: it requires a browser plug-in. If Silverlight was not created by Microsoft, this would doom it to failure. But Silverlight is created by Microsoft, and they will apply vast resources to gaining acceptance for this new technology. Silverlight is already an optional download on Windows Update – we suspect that Microsoft cannot make it a compulsory download because this would attract criticism. One strategy is for Microsoft to encourage major sites – like Facebook which they own a stake in – to launch new exciting features which require Silverlight. This would immediately drive many users to install the plug-in. Also, systems administrators will be more prepared to install the software than they would for a plug-in from another company.

A less significant problem for Silverlight is that Microsoft has delivered a Mac version, which appears to work – but the Linux version is delayed. Linux support has come in the form of Moonlight - an open source implementation of Silverlight.

The best site right now is the MS home page for Silverlight - http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/overview/default.aspx