A Decade Later, .NET Developers Still Fear Being 'Silverlighted' by Microsoft -- Visual Studio Magazine

Some 10 years after the final Microsoft Silverlight release, some developers still fear being "Silverlighted," or seeing a development product in which they have invested heavily be abandoned by Microsoft.

Microsoft will tell you that official support for Silverlight will end in less than two months, on Oct. 12, 2021. Anyone in the industry will tell you it effectively died around 2011 when the last version, Silverlight 5, was made available for download. Speculation about its demise arose around the same time.

Silverlight is described by Wikipedia as an application framework designed for writing and running Rich Web Applications, supporting multimedia, graphics and animation. It became a favorite tool for many developers, including this reporter, who created a spiffy blackjack card game in which Silverlight animation was used to make the playing cards spin and flop through the air as they were dealt from the deck to the playing surface. It was cool.

Hello HTML5, Goodbye Silverlight Many real developers felt the same way and invested themselves in Silverlight, only to see Microsoft deprecate the plugin technology in favor of emerging standards like HTML5. Although still officially a supported product, Silverlight effectively died years ago as browser after browser has dropped Silverlight support, basically leaving only Internet Explorer 11 on Windows as the sole browser it still works with.

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