Silverlight Platform

Overview

Microsoft Silverlight is a Software Platform for building and running Rich Client Side Application , So Silverlight can be embedded inside HTML like the Flash Macromedia or can render outside the browser like WPF.

Silverlight is cross browser , cross platform , it is a small implantation of the .NET Framework or a sub platform of the .NET . Silverlight use an extensible markup language called XAML to easy User Interface controls representation.

Silverlight Platform Architecture

Here a brief description of each component

1- Silverlight API's

Microsoft Ajax Library : The Microsoft Ajax Library is a JavaScript library that provides the AJAX framework features for the .NET client also it provides an infrastructure to build either visual or non-visual JavaScript components.
JavaScript Engine : The JavaScript ApI uses a small subset of the objects that are currently available in Silverlight , plus a handful of objects that are specific to the JavaScript API.The Silverlight XAML parser only creates objects in the object tree for this subset, because the object tree is created based on the fixed native-code implementation that underlies the JavaScript API.

2- Windows Communication Foundation

REST : Representational State Transfer is a classes is used for data access over XML web services.
WCF : Provide Some Features that make the HTTP Request and Response easier also it support Cross HTTP Requests.

3- Windows Presentation Foundation

The Silverlight .NET Framework is a subset of the WPF is a subset of the WPF User Interface Programming Model , this including all the primitive silverlight controls (Shapes , Rectangle , ........).