Summary
This chapter explained what Silverlight has to offer for client application developers in terms of skills reuse (for .NET programmers) and cross-browser, cross-platform compatibility. We talked about a few alternative technologies, both in the web browser and outside. Then we saw how Silverlight evolved in the past few years to become Silverlight 4, and talked about the future. Finally, we installed Silverlight 4 (if it was not there already) and visited a few demos showing off some nice features available in the framework.
In the next chapter, we install the tools that we need to develop Silverlight applications, and take a tour of their features. This will be very important because we will spend many hours in those tools, both in this book and, should you like Silverlight, after you have finished reading.