Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

August 03, 2010

Utilizing Silverlight with Windows Server Hosting

One of the most underutilized pieces of Windows web hosting technology features is Microsoft Silverlight. With the web world focused on other successful elements like ASP, ASP.NET, FrontPage and MS SQL, Silverlight has been tossed to the side. Silverlight offers many functional and overlooked functions that can be greatly useful to webmasters and developers alike.

What is Microsoft Silverlight?

This powerful facet of Windows hosting is a browser plug-in supported by all major browsers including, FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari. A nice feature is that it’s also compatible with Linux, UNIX and Mac operating systems. Silverlight is similar to Flash as it permits users to fully view different streaming media applications directly from their browser. It also allows users to watch music videos and listen to music almost in real-time.

The most appealing benefit is the integration ability with web applications. This can all be attributed to a well-written framework that supports many programming languages. Silverlight was developed to be smooth, robust and overall outstanding in an intensive environment.

The Features of Microsoft Silverlight 3

Silverlight 3 is the most recent version of Microsoft Silverlight, being released on July 9^th, 2009. There are many improvements and features found in this version. These include:

• Improved use experience
• SEO-friendly
• Deep linking possibilities

Silverlight 3 is packaged with text enhancements, font support, animation features and new three dimensional graphics. These all allow web developers the flexibility to create advanced web browsing experiences provided to the end-user.

Another feature is the SEO friendliness of Silverlight 3. There are built-in SEO tasks that are compatible with many different tools. Content can be mirrored from ASP.NET controls into an easy HTML format that will be indexed by search engine bots. In turn, this greatly improves page ranking.

Finally, there are many deep linking possibilities available with Silverlight 3. This is a vast improvement as it now fully supports deep linking which allows for bookmarking of pages with rich internet applications. These are just a glimpse of some of the many features available with Microsoft Silverlight 3. Hosting this technology on a Windows host is extremely simplified due to the lack of requirements and cross-platform abilities.

As Microsoft Silverlight continues to add useful, high-quality features to their upcoming versions, more web developers and users will adopt this technology. This powerful program found on all server platforms is backed by a top-notch software company known for developing some of the best programs for web hosting.

Tags: Flash,  Windows hosting,  MS SQL,  FrontPage,  asp.net,  ASP,  Microsoft Silverlight,  Silverlight