Originally,this release was called WPF/E,which stands for Windows Presentation
Foundation/Everywhere.

The major drawback of this release is no support for managed code which means you can’t use
.NET supported programming languages for manipulating GUI elements which is hard for
non-JavaScript programmers.

A Silverlight application starts by invoking the Silverlight control from the HTML page,which
then loads up a XAML file.

The XAML file contains a Canvas object, which acts as a placeholder for other elements.
Silverlight provides various geometrical primitives like lines,ellipses,other shapes,to
elements like text,images,media etc.

Silverlight 2.0
Silverlight 2.0 was released in March 2008.

This as the first release of Silverlight for starting application development because of a lot of
limitations in Silverlight 1.0 and which was not ready for developing applications efficiently.

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.
In this release, Silverlight came up with its own library, which is a subset of .NET framework’s
Base Class Library,including controls,components,support for Web Services,and LINQ API features.

Silverlight 3.0
Silverlight version 3.0 was released in July 9, 2009.
Support for new media formats, IIS Media Services, Silverlight DRM for media streaming.

Support for 3D graphics,Animation,Pixel shaders,Theme application support,Enhanced
control-skinning,Improved text rendering,Bitmap APIs.

New networking APIs (new offline APIs for Out-of-Browser functionality),Silverlight 3 SDK,
New FormsXAML controls,New DataManipulationXAML controls,New ContentXAML
controls,Other user interface framework improvements,Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Silverlight 4.0
Silverlight version 4.0 beta was released on November 18, 2009, at the Professional Developers’
Conference in Los Angeles, by Microsoft Corp.
Silverlight 4 delivers a full suite of powerful capabilities to business application developers,
bringing the best-of-breed.
With printing support, rich reporting and charting, and integration with back-end systems
and server products including Microsoft SharePoint.
WCF RIA Services introduces enterprise class networking and data access for building n-tier
applications including transactions,paging of data,WCF and HTTP enhancements.