Lazycoder

What do you really get with Silverlight?

Microsoft Changes the Development Game

Microsoft now has an officially-supported cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework. That’s cross-platform folks, not just cross-browser. That means, in the not too distant future those cool .NET apps you’ve been working so hard on (you HAVE been building apps on .NET, right?) will run on a Mac too.

Everybody hold on with the “.NET Framework running on a Mac” stuff. What do you REALLY get in the Silverlight plugin for Safari?

• The CLR in the browser – You get an embedded version of the Common Language Runtime. This means you can run IL code in the plugin. Remember the CLR is NOT the .NET Framework.
• A subset of the .NET Framework. For sure it includes LINQ and some Networking classes. I haven’t found a full list of what namespaces are included in the Siilverlight plugin but it’s still early. Chances are your only options for getting data in will be JSON via Javascript or XMl. No live connections to SQL Server or Oracle databases from your Silverlight application.

Edit: The full list of namespaces and types included in the Silverlight plugin are listed in the .CHM documentation under the “Silverlight Managed Referece” section.