Comparison Between Silverlight 1.0 and 2.0
Silverlight 1.0 is a cross-platforms and cross-browsers plugin to display
Web pages holding XAML code.
Silverlight 2.0 (formerly 1.1) is an interface to .NET. It also works with
most browsers, but it requires a subset of the .NET platform or a compatible
platform. This enables it to use languages other than JavaScript. Actually
it has a virtual machine such as Java.
| Features | Silverlight 1.0 | Silverlight 2.0 |
|---|---|---|
| AJAX | Yes | Yes |
| Cross browsers | Yes | Yes |
| Cross platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux). | Yes | Yes |
| Integration into HTML | Yes | Yes |
| Using DOM | Yes | Yes |
| HTTP Functions | Yes | Yes |
| JavaScript language | Yes | Yes |
| Other .NET languages | - | Yes |
| 2D Graphic | Yes | Yes |
| JPG et PNG Images | Yes | Yes |
| High definition video | Yes | Yes |
| Audio/Video (VC-1, WMV, WMA, MP3) | Yes | Yes |
| ASP.NET Controls (as asp:xaml) | Yes | Yes |
| XAML Parser | Yes | Yes |
| RIA Controls | - | Yes |
| Managed control framework | - | Yes |
| Improved security | - | Yes |
| Multi-threading | - | Yes |
| REST, JSON Web services | - | Yes |
| LINQ | - | Yes |
| Read/write XML on the server | - | Yes |
| Offline | - | - |
| Download size | 2 MB | 4 MB |
It is not said if the two solutions will coexist, or if the latter will have to replace the first. Version 1.0 is a subset of 2.0, which offers greater portability through the virtual machine and should replace the first version.