Difference Between Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Microsoft Silverlight 4

Microsoft Silverlight 5 vs Microsoft Silverlight 4

Microsoft Silverlight 5和Microsoft Silverlight 4分别是2011年和2010年发布的Microsoft Silverlight的两个版本。Microsoft Silverlight是用于为Web创建丰富的交互式应用程序（RIA）的应用程序框架。它得到了大多数Web浏览器的支持，包括Microsoft Internet Explorer和Mozilla Firefox，它与包括Microsoft Windows和Mac OS X操作系统在内的不同平台兼容。Microsoft Silverlight将几种技术结合到单个开发环境中，该环境使开发人员可以选择其选择的工具和编程语言。Silverlight提供了与Adobe Flash相似的功能。MS Silverlight的早期版本着重于支持流媒体，而当前版本则支持多媒体，图形和动画。Silverlight MS的第一版发行于2007年，目前Silverlight的第五版。

MS Silverlight 4

Silverlight 4 was released in April 15, 2010 and it aimed to establish its position as the natural choice for developers to build business applications on the web. To achieve this goal, it included some special features such as comprehensive printing support, more than sixty customizable set of controls including RichTextArea with hyperlinks, images and editing. Silverlight 4 also provided localization enhancements with bidirectional text and complex scripts for 30 new languages including Arabic, Hebrew and Thai. Further, Silverlight 4 provided improved support for data binding, which would reduce the amount of code needs to be written by a developer while working with customized data. Silverlight 4 also provides additional capabilities for developers to create applications with richer and more appealing media features including enhanced animation capabilities. Silverlight 4 was the first version of Silverlight to support Google Chrome web browser.

MS Silverlight 5

Silverlight 5, the newest version of MS Silverlight, intended to be released in the latter half of 2011, promises to be a powerful tool for developing rich internet applications with a great media experience. Highlights of Siverlight 5 are the improvements in video quality and performance and also it provides feature to improve the productivity of developers. Silverlight 5 improves performance by reducing the network latency using a background thread for networking and it also provides support for 64-bit operating systems. Silverlight 5 also improves debugging support by allowing breakpoints to be set on a binding, which will allow stepping through binding failures. Hardware acceleration is also enabled in windowless mode with Internet Explorer 9. Additionally, Silverlight 5 provides improvements to text that allows building rich magazine-style text layouts.

What is the difference between Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Microsoft Silverlight 4

Even though Silverlight 5 is developed using Silverlight 4 as a foundation, they have some noticeable differences. Silverlight 5 introduces more than 40 new features that were not present in silverlight 4. These features include support for running Silverlight applications within the browser with desktop features, impressive video quality with improved performance and some added features to improve the efficiency of developers. Siverlight 5 also allows trusted applications to access the local file system without a restriction and out-of-browser trusted applications are allowed to create multiple window instances. Further, Silverlight 5 includes new classes for sound effects and they can be used to manage the sound effects of a developed application. Finally, unlike Silverlight 4, Silverligth 5 provides features to check and change the playback rate of media.