- Where Does Silverlight Come From?
- Using Third-Party Plug-Ins
- Running on Multiple Platforms
- Making the Web Application Secure
- Introducing Silverlight.net
- What Do You Need to Run Silverlight?
- Updating Your Runtime-Automatically
- Trying Silverlight Demos
- What Do You Need to Develop Silverlight?
- Reading the Documentation
- Looking into Silverlight's Future
- Summary
What Do You Need to Run Silverlight?
Silverlight is an add-on to the web browser. It gets installed separately and adds functionality to your web pages. It is currently available for Internet Explorer and Firefox on the Windows XP and Vista operating systems; it is also available for Firefox and Safari on the Macintosh. At the time of this writing, a version for Linux is in preparation, following a historical agreement between Microsoft and Novell.
To run Silverlight applications, you need a compatible web browser. When you point a Silverlight-capable web browser to a web page with Silverlight content, you get a small Install Microsoft Silverlight icon, as shown in Figure 1.2, instead of the Silverlight content.
- Click on the icon to be taken to a Microsoft web page where you can download and install the Silverlight runtime on your PC.
- After installing Silverlight in Internet Explorer, you don’t even need to restart your web browser. In Firefox, you might have to, but it’s not that big a deal.
Figure 1.2 The Install Microsoft Silverlight icon
Alternatively, you can install Silverlight 2 from http://silverlight.net/GetStarted.