SilverlightThe final version of Silverlight 4 has been released to web (RTW), which means the code development is done, and ready to be downloaded and installed on Windows and Mac OS X system. Silverlight is a web application framework to create interactive apps integrating multimedia, graphics, animation, video streaming for online web or offline desktop or mobile environment. In a sense, Silverlight is similar to Adobe Flash, and competes with Flash for popularity.

Silverlight 4 features support for Google Chrome web browser, in addition to Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7 and IE8), Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari already supported. Silverlight, as it’s a slimmed-down, cross-platform version of Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) programming model, has its version 4 includes more WPF functionality. Silverlight 4 adds support for data binding, enterprise networking and printing.

In order to run web apps or web services developed by Silverlight 4 platform, a runtime has to be installed. Silverlight runtime works as a browser plug-in or add-on to support multimedia content. Any older or previous version of Silverlight, such as Silverlight 3, is also recommended to upgrade to Silverlight 4.

Silverlight 4 can be download from http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/, or directly download the Silverlight 4 setup installer: Silverlight.exe