Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued

application framework In computer programming, an application framework consists of a software framework used by software developers to implement the standard structure of application software. Application frameworks became popular with the rise of graphical user inte ...

designed for writing and running

rich internet application A Rich Internet Application (also known as a rich web application, RIA or installable Internet application) is a web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software. The concept is closely related to a single-page ...

s, similar to

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

's runtime,

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a mostly discontinuedAlthough it is discontinued by Adobe Inc., for the Chinese market it is developed by Zhongcheng and for the international enterprise market it is developed by Ha ...

. While early versions of Silverlight focused on

streaming media Streaming media refers to multimedia delivered through a Computer network, network for playback using a Media player (disambiguation), media player. Media is transferred in a ''stream'' of Network packet, packets from a Server (computing), ...

, later versions supported

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms, such as Text (literary theory), writing, Sound, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. T ...

graphics Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of the data, as in design and manufa ...

, and animation, and gave support to developers for

CLI languages CLI languages are computer programming languages that are used to produce libraries and programs that conform to the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specifications. With some notable exceptions, most CLI languages compile entirely to the Com ...

and

development tools A programming tool or software development tool is a computer program that is used to develop another computer program, usually by helping the developer manage computer files. For example, a programmer may use a tool called a source code editor ...

. Silverlight was one of the two application development platforms for

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft Mobile for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design languag ...

, but web pages using Silverlight did not run on the Windows Phone or

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDA). Designed to be the portable equivalent of the Windows desktop OS in the emerging Mobile device, mobile/port ...

versions of

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

, as there was no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms. Microsoft terminated support for Silverlight on

Internet Explorer 11 Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) is the eleventh and final version of the Internet Explorer web browser, by now retired. It was initially included in the release of Windows 8.1, Windows RT, Windows RT 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 on October 17, 2013 ...

(the last remaining web browser still supporting Silverlight) on October 12, 2021.

History

Introduction

From the initial launch in 2007, reviewers compared the product to (since discontinued) Adobe's Flash.

Adoption

According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration of 64.2% in May 2011. Usage in July 2010 was 53.6%, whereas market leader Adobe Flash was installed on 95.3% of browsers, and Java was supported on 76.5% of browsers. Support of these plugins is not mutually exclusive; one system can support all three. Silverlight was used to provide video streaming for the

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. It is one of NBCUniversal's ...

coverage of the

2008 Summer Olympics The 2008 Summer Olympics (), officially the Games of the XXIX Olympiad () and officially branded as Beijing 2008 (), were an international multisport event held from 8 to 24 August 2008, in Beijing, China. A total of 10,942 athletes fro ...

in Beijing, the

2010 Winter Olympics The 2010 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XXI Olympic Winter Games () and also known as Vancouver 2010 (), were an international winter multi-sport event held from February 12 to 28, 2010 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with ...

in Vancouver, and the 2008 conventions for both major United States political parties. Silverlight was also used by

Amazon Video Amazon Prime Video, known simply as Prime Video, is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming television service owned by Amazon. The service primarily distributes films and television series produced or co-produced by ...

and

Netflix Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...

for their instant video streaming services, but Netflix said in its Tech Blog in 2013 that, since Microsoft had announced Silverlight's end-of-life, they would be moving to

HTML video HTML video is a subject of the HTML specification as the standard way of playing video via the web. Introduced in HTML5, it is designed to partially replace the object element and the previous de facto standard of using the proprietary Adobe Fla ...

Demise

Industry observers announced the death of Silverlight as early as 2011. In 2012, Microsoft deprecated Silverlight for

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, made available for download via Microsoft ...

, but until 2015 it was not clear what Microsoft's official position was on Silverlight's future. In July 2015, a Microsoft blog post clarified that, "… we encourage companies that are using Silverlight for media to begin the transition to DASH/MSE/CENC/EME based designs". Microsoft planned to terminate Silverlight support on October 12, 2021. Support for IE7–8 was removed between 2014 and 2016, depending on the OS. Support for IE9 and IE10 has also ended "or though icthe support lifecycle of the underlying browsers, whichever is shorter." There is no Silverlight plugin available for Microsoft Edge egacyor newer. It has not been supported by

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...

since September 2015 or by

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

since March 2017. , less than 0.02% of sites used Silverlight, less than 1.3% used the also discontinued Adobe Flash Player, and less than 0.03% use Java client-side (while less than 4.7% use Java server-side).

Overview

Silverlight provides a

retained mode Retained mode in computer graphics is a major pattern of API design in graphics libraries, in which * the graphics library, instead of the client, retains the scene (complete object model of the rendering primitives) to be rendered and * th ...

graphics system similar to

Windows Presentation Foundation Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a free and open-source user interface framework for Windows-based desktop applications. WPF applications are based in .NET, and are primarily developed using C# and XAML. Originally developed by Microso ...

(WPF), and integrates

, animations, and

interactivity Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but ...

into a single run-time environment. In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in

Extensible Application Markup Language Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML ) is a declarative XML-based language developed by Microsoft for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. XAML is used extensively in ...

(XAML) and programmed using a subset of the .NET Framework. XAML can be used for marking up the

vector graphics Vector graphics are a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector displ ...

and animations. Silverlight can also be used to create

Windows Sidebar Windows Desktop Gadgets (called Windows Sidebar in Windows Vista) is a discontinued widget engine for Microsoft Gadgets. Desktop Gadgets have been replaced by Windows 10 Taskbar Widgets. It was introduced with Windows Vista, in which it features ...

gadgets A gadget is a mechanical device or any ingenious article. Gadgets are sometimes referred to as '' gizmos''. History The etymology of the word is disputed. The word first appears as reference to an 18th-century tool in glassmaking that was dev ...

for

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

. Silverlight supports

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and d ...

video,

Advanced Audio Coding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. It was developed by Dolby, AT&T, Fraunhofer and Sony, originally as part of the MPEG-2 specification but later improved under MPEG-4.ISO (2006ISO/ ...

Windows Media Video Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: the original video compression technolog ...

(WMV),

Windows Media Audio Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. Audio encoded in WMA is stored in a digi ...

(WMA), and MPEG Layer III (MP3) media content across all supported browsers without requiring

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP, officially referred to as Windows Media Player Legacy to retronym, distinguish it from Windows Media Player (2022), the new Windows Media Player introduced with Windows 11) is the first media player (application soft ...

, the

ActiveX ActiveX is a deprecated software framework created by Microsoft that adapts its earlier Component Object Model (COM) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies for content downloaded from a network, particularly from the World Wide W ...

control, or

Windows Media Windows Media is a discontinued multimedia framework for media creation and distribution for Microsoft Windows. It consists of a software development kit (SDK) with several application programming interfaces (API) and a number of prebuilt technol ...

browser plug-ins. Because Windows Media Video 9 is an implementation of the

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (, rarely ), founded by Charles Francis Jenkins in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, is a global professional association of engineers, technologists, and e ...

(SMPTE)

VC-1 SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...

standard, Silverlight also supports VC-1 video. According to the

end user license agreement An end-user license agreement or EULA () is a legal contract between a software supplier and a customer or end-user. The practice of selling licenses to rather than copies of software predates the recognition of software copyright, which has b ...

VC-1 and H.264 are only licensed for the "personal and non-commercial use of a consumer". Silverlight makes it possible to dynamically load

Extensible Markup Language Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The Wor ...

(XML) content that can be manipulated through a

Document Object Model The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cros s-platform and language-independent API that treats an HTML or XML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document with ...

(DOM) interface, a technique that is consistent with conventional

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * Ajax (play), ''Ajax'' (play), by the an ...

techniques. Silverlight exposes a ''Downloader'' object which can be used to download content, like scripts, media assets, or other data, as may be required by the application. With version 2, the programming logic can be written in any

.NET The .NET platform (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a free and open-source, managed code, managed computer software framework for Microsoft Windows, Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft emplo ...

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

, including some nuclear evolution of common

dynamic programming language A dynamic programming language is a type of programming language that allows various operations to be determined and executed at runtime. This is different from the compilation phase. Key decisions about variables, method calls, or data types are ...

s like

IronRuby IronRuby is an implementation of the Ruby programming language targeting Microsoft .NET Framework. It is implemented on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), a library running on top of the Common Language Infrastructure that provides dynam ...

and

IronPython IronPython is an implementation of the Python programming language targeting the .NET and Mono frameworks. The project is currently maintained by a group of volunteers at GitHub. It is free and open-source software, and can be implemented with P ...

. A

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

implementation (now abandoned) named

Moonlight Moonlight consists of mostly sunlight (with little earthlight) reflected from the parts of the Moon's surface where the Sun's light strikes. History The ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras was aware that "''the sun provides the moon with its ...

, developed by

Novell Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...

in cooperation with Microsoft, was released to bring Silverlight version 1 and 2 functionality to

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

, and other open source platforms, although some Linux distributions did not include it, citing redistribution and

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

concerns. However, in May 2012, Moonlight was abandoned because of its lack of popularity.

Supported platforms

Over the course of about five years,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

had released five versions with varying platform support: the first version was released in 2007, and the fifth (and final) major version on May 8, 2012. It is compatible with later versions of Internet Explorer web browser on Microsoft Windows (except

Windows RT Windows RT is a mobile operating system developed by Microsoft and released alongside Windows 8 on October 26, 2012. It is a version of Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 built for the 32-bit ARM architecture (ARMv7), designed to take advantage of th ...

)

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, with

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

on Apple

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, and with mobile devices using the

and

Symbian Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS ...

(Series 60) platforms. Cross-platform Mozilla Firefox support for Silverlight was removed in Firefox 52 released in March 2017 when Mozilla removed support for

NPAPI Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) is a deprecated application programming interface (API) for web browser plugins, initially developed for Netscape Navigator 2.0 in 1995 and subsequently adopted by other browsers. In the ...

plugins, bringing it in-line with the removal of NPAPI plugin support in Google Chrome.

Desktop computers

Silverlight requires an

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

processor with

Streaming SIMD Extensions In computing, Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) is a single instruction, multiple data ( SIMD) instruction set extension to the x86 architecture, designed by Intel and introduced in 1999 in its Pentium III series of central processing units (CPU ...

(SSE) support. Supported processors include the

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

Pentium III The Pentium III (marketed as Intel Pentium III Processor, informally PIII or P3) brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999 ...

and up, the

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Athlon XP AMD Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices. The original Athlon (now called Athlon Classic) was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and the fi ...

and up, and newer AMD

Duron Duron is a line of budget x86-compatible microprocessors manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices, AMD and released on June 19, 2000. Duron was intended to be a lower-cost offering to complement AMD's then mainstream performance Athlon process ...

s. The following table presents an availability and compatibility matrix of Silverlight versions for various operating systems and web browsers. Support for

Opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...

had been promised since May 3, 2007, when David Storey, the Chief Web Opener at Opera, revealed a Microsoft poster for MIX conference that had shown Opera integration as a part of Silverlight 1.1. However, Opera was never officially supported by Silverlight. On Linux and FreeBSD, the functionality was available via

and Pipelight, though both projects have since been discontinued. Moonlight is available for the major

distributions, with support for

Konqueror Konqueror is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source web browser and file manager that provides World Wide Web, web access and file viewer, file-viewer functionality for file systems (such as local files, files on a remote FTP ser ...

, and Opera browsers, provided it was obtained through Novell.

Miguel de Icaza Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972) is a Mexican-American programmer and activist, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. Biography Early years De Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied Mathematics at the Nation ...

has expressed an interest in working with developers from other operating systems (BSD, Solaris) and other browsers (Konqueror, WebKit and Opera) to ensure that Moonlight works fine on their systems. Availability of Moonlight version 1.0 for FreeBSD was announced in March 2009, but has since been reported not to actually work. , the current version of Moonlight (4 Preview 1) does not officially work on new versions of Firefox (newer than 3.x) on Linux-based operating systems. However, it can be installed in an unofficial way (for example using th
Add-on Compatibility Reporter
add-on) and with Firefox 11 it works correctly when installed. As noted above, the Moonlight project was abandoned in May 2012. A browser plugin named Pipelight used to provide Silverlight access. Pipelight requires browser support for NPAPI plugins, which newer versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera have dropped. As of 2018, the Pipelight project has been discontinued.

Mobile devices

Silverlight was not available on

Android Android most commonly refers to: *Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), a mobile operating system primarily developed by Google * Android TV, a operating system developed ...

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

, the most prevalent operating systems on the mobile market. Silverlight was the primary development environment for

(that is by now discontinued) and is based on Silverlight 4. For previous versions of Windows Mobile, the first

Community Technology Preview The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

(CTP) for

Windows Mobile 6 Windows Mobile 6, formerly codenamed "Crossbow",De Herrera, Chris pocketpcfaq.com. Retrieved September 6, 2007. is a version of Windows Mobile released on February 12, 2007 at the 3GSM World Congress 2007. It comes in three different versions: "W ...

was expected in the second quarter of 2008, but it still has not been officially announced. Microsoft has stopped focusing on bringing Silverlight to Windows Mobile 6.x.

Nokia Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...

announced plans to make Silverlight for Mobile available for S60 on

Symbian OS Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS ...

, as well as for

Series 40 Nokia Series 40 Platform, often shortened as S40, is a software platform and application user interface (UI) software that was previously used on Nokia's broad range of mid-tier feature phones from 2002 to 2014, as well as on some of the Vertu l ...

devices and Nokia internet tablets (while it later sold the business to Microsoft and now sells Android tablets and will sell

Alcatel-Lucent Alcatel-Lucent S.A. () was a multinational telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, France. The company focused on Fixed line telephone, fixed, Mobile phone, mobile and telecommunications convergence, ...

branded smartphones). Silverlight for Mobile supports Silverlight 2 content and .NET languages. Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.5 is based on Silverlight 4.

Development tools

Silverlight applications could be written in any .NET programming language. As such, any

which can be used with .NET languages can work with Silverlight, provided they can target the Silverlight CoreCLR for hosting the application, instead of the .NET Framework CLR. Microsoft has positioned

Microsoft Expression Blend Microsoft Blend for Visual Studio (formerly Microsoft Expression Blend) is a user interface design tool developed and sold by Microsoft for creating graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two type ...

as a companion tool to Visual Studio for the design of Silverlight User Interface applications.

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development ...

can be used to develop and debug Silverlight applications. To create Silverlight projects and let the compiler target CoreCLR, Visual Studio requires the ''Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio''. A Silverlight control is a ZIP format file with extension .XAP containing a list of one or more .NET managed assemblies (.DLL files) along with the AppManifest.XAML file containing this list along with the entry point (class and assembly). It can be hosted in any HTML file using an object tag, for example:

A Silverlight project contains the and files which initializes the Silverlight plug-in for use in HTML pages, a XAML file for the UI, and code-behind files for the application code. Silverlight applications are debugged in a manner similar to ASP.NET applications. Visual Studio's ''CLR Remote Cross Platform Debugging'' feature can be used to debug Silverlight applications running on a different platform as well. In conjunction with the release of Silverlight 2,

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event which occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ...

was added as a development tool option.

Licensing

An April 2007 ''

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online-only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tec ...

'' report, suggested that Microsoft intended to release certain parts of Silverlight source code as

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

software, but a week later Sam Ramji, director of platform technology strategy at Microsoft, contradicted the rumors by confirming that the company had no plans to open Silverlight. Some controls that ship with Silverlight are available under the

Microsoft Public License The Shared Source Initiative (SSI) is a source-available software licensing scheme launched by Microsoft in May 2001. The program includes a spectrum of technologies and licenses, and most of its source code offerings are available for download aft ...

as a part of a separate project known as the ''Silverlight Toolkit''. At introduction, Silverlight's

proprietary {{Short pages monitor {{Rich web applications 2007 software Products and services discontinued in 2021 Microsoft application programming interfaces Pocket PC software Rich web application frameworks Microsoft Silverlight Symbian software Windows Mobile Standard software