The Adobe Flash Player has become as common place as HTML in the web world. Many educational games are built on Flash. Flash makes boring web pages come to life. The interactive web world has been divided into the Flash player type add-on technologies and the dynamic HTML crowd. Microsoft is attempting to bridge the gap with their Silverlight framework.
Microsoft has recently released their latest version of their Silverlight framework which allows programmers to create "Flash-like" applications in a Microsoft way. These programs run on an add-on to your browser that comes from Microsoft directly called Silverlight. With Silverlight, web designers and programmers who are used to creating applications for Windows can now move their interactive programs to the web.
We're starting to use Silverlight at melwin.net. Our first attempt is our online Learning Library, which focuses on teaching basic library skills. With Silverlight, you can play music, videos, create animations and much more. It's an upcoming technology and has a strong backing from one of the largest players in the industry. Writing Silverlight programs isn't trivial and requires either programming skills or really good scripting abilities. Microsoft has released a set of free tools to get most people started creating Silverlight-enabled websites.
It's still a bit of a brain exercise to get things to work just the way you want them to, but the potential is there to transform the "flat" web to a more interactive world. At melwin.net, we intend on creating some easy to learn Silverlight tools for children, which should open a world of creative possibilities.
A good book to get to start learning about Microsoft Silverlight is the Silverlight 3 Jumpstart by David Yack.
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