Microsoft Silverlight, formerly known as the Windows Forms application, is a discontinued programming platform designed for developing and deploying rich internet applications, much like Adobe’s offline runtime, Adobe Flash. There are some Silverlight applications that do not run on the web and can run on the desktop through the use of Silverlight Desktop, also known as the Windows Media Player plugin for Silverlight viewer. The Silverlight technology itself is based on the Silverlight framework that was introduced in the mid-’90s by two organizations; Mosaic Technologies and Microsoft. The framework has been vastly improved over the years to become what is today known as Silverlight. A Silverlight plugin is available for almost all browsers nowadays.
To develop any Silverlight-based application, first, a developer would need to install the latest version of the plugin and get the software development kit installed on his system. After that, a new instance of the Silverlight browser would be needed, with the latest version. To use this browser, a Silverlight window must be opened, making use of the provided shortcut on the desktop to launch the application. There are many Silverlight plugins that have the capability of rendering visual content in the form of movies, JavaScript codes, and so forth for use in both the web and the Silverlight browser. These types of plugins are called “extensions.”
Over the years, there have been several different versions of the Microsoft Silverlight software framework released under different guises. One such extension is the Silverlight for the Mac, which is a port of the older Silverlight software framework for the PC. The Silverlight for Mac works almost identically the way Silverlight does for the PC and can be downloaded from the official website for a minimal fee. The use of a Mac computer allows it to run a virtual Windows environment, which makes the whole process of working with Silverlight on Mac a lot more convenient than it would otherwise be. In essence, using a Mac computer makes working with Silverlight much easier than it would otherwise be, especially for those who do not use their computers much.
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