Introducing Silverlight 1.1

What Is Silverlight 1.1?

Silverlight 1.1 is Microsoft’s second planned release of the Silverlight platform. Silverlight 1.1’s biggest change from Silverlight 1.0 is the inclusion of a compact version of the .NET Framework, complete with the .NET Framework 3.0 Common Language Runtime. By adding .NET to Silverlight, Microsoft will make it easy for developers to reuse their existing programming skills to work with designers and quickly create rich applications for the Web.

And even though Silverlight 1.1 will bring .NET to the client, it can be easily integrated with many existing web technologies and backend web platforms. That means Silverlight will integrate with your existing infrastructure and applications, from IIS and .NET to Apache and PHP to simple JavaScript and XHTML on the client. Silverlight will not be a tool exclusive to ASP.NET web sites, which should result in broader adoption of the new technology.

Still, one of the key benefits of Silverlight 1.1 is that it can execute any .NET language, including C# and VB.NET. Unlike the CLR included with the “normal” .NET Framework, multiple instances of the core “Silverlight CLR” can be hosted in a single process. With this, the layout markup in the Silverlight XAML (.xaml) file can be augmented by code-behind code with all programming logic written in any .NET language.

Silverlight 1.1 ships with a “lightweight” version of the full .NET Framework, which features—among other classes—extensible controls, XML Web Services, networking ...