Versions of Silverlight

Silverlight 1.0

This is the first release of Silverlight technology in 2007.Originally this release was called WPF/E, which stands for Windows Presentation Foundation/ Everywhere. This release consists of the core presentation framework, which is responsible for UI, interactivity and user input, basic UI controls, graphics and animation, media playback and DOM integration.
The Major drawback of this release is not supporting managed code, which means you can't use .NET supported programming languages for manipulating GUI elements. This was managed by scripting programming languages like Java Script (Only interpretation no compilation), which is hard for non Java Script programmers.


Applications are written either completely in XAML or in a mix of XAML and JavaScript with DOM (Document Object Model) to manipulate the user interface. Since there is no managed code there is no compilation required only JavaScript is interpreted on the client (browser).

Silverlight 2.0

Silverlight 2.0 released in March 2008. We can consider this is the first release of the Silverlight for start application development which supports managed code, living in the .NET world without managed code is very difficulty (actually not possible ).
Silverlight 2.0 supports .NET programming languages like C#, VB.NET to write business logic or manipulate UI Elements at client side. Silverlight 2.0 is based on .NET Framework 3.5.
You can have a code behind file for every XAML (.xaml) file like ASP.NET (.aspx) pages to handle the business logic. It can be used to programmatically manipulate both the Silverlight application and the HTML page which hosts the Silverlight control. The XAML markup as well as the code, is compiled into .NET assemblies which are then compressed using ZIP and stored in a .xap file.

Silverlight 3.0

Silverlight version 3.0 was release in July, 2009, which is an extension to Silverlight 2.0 and mainly provides improvements in graphics capabilities, media management, application development areas (additional controls, enhanced binding support, and out-of-browser functionality), and integration in the designers' Expression Blend 3 tools.

Silverlight 4.0

Silverlight version 4.0 was release in April, 2010. New features in Silverlight 4 include:

• Support for Google's Chrome browser.
• Printing support.
• Improved mouse support including right button support and mouse wheel support.
• Web cam and microphone support.
• Clipboard and drag and drop support.
• New hosted browser support for rendering HTML inside Silverlight.
• New and enhanced controls such as a RichTextBox and an enhanced DataGrid control.
• New notification support to display messages to end users.
• New support for implicit theming of controls.
• WCF data layer enhancements.
• Localization enhancements with bi-directional text.
• Support for Managed Extensibility Framework.
• Enhanced data binding support.
• Enhanced animation effects.
• Deep Zoom performance enhancements.
• WCF Rich Internet application (RIA) Services.
• Full keyboard access while running in full screen mode.
• Programmatic access to a user's local document folder.