Latest Microsoft Silverlight Version

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Laurene Arrison

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Aug 3, 2024, 2:50:05 PM8/3/24

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Silverlight runtime is a CLR, as such any .NET code running within it can use any standard method available to it. In this case, System.Environment.Version is used to get the version of the CLR that the executing code is presently running within, if you use this from within a silverlight application you will get the silverlight version running on that sys

You can visit the official page of Silverlight to check the version.

EDIT:You can do it from a console application. Just fetch the web page in a buffer and find the version number using regular expressions or simple string processing. See here for an example of how to fetch a web page in a buffer.

EDIT:See this question. This might work for you.

I pushed out an update for silverlight yesterday, and a group is complaining it broke their app. So need to remove the current version of SL and install the previous one. I indexed the pkg and told casper to remove it, however, when I try to push the old version down it returns an error:

So I had this issue a while back and solved it by including a command in advanced or Files and Processes to search for file by path /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/PlayReady/mspr.hds then checking the checkbox to remove if found.

So, sometimes I try to figure this out by composing an installation of something I want to remove, just to see what it puts where. If nothing else, you can do like you did and build an uninstaller script based on that knowledge.

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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.

As an old Microsoft FAQ states: "Silverlight 5 is the only version currently supported. Silverlight 5 will support the browsers listed on this page through October 12, 2021, or through the lifecycle of the underlying browsers, whichever is shorter." It turns out that the latter was shorter as clicking on the "this page" link in the above text just goes to a "Get Microsoft Silverlight" site where apparently anyone not using IE 11 on Windows is told: "You are running on a browser that may not be fully compatible with Microsoft Silverlight. You can still try to install by clicking below or you can refer to the System Requirements for more information."

So it's dead already, for all practical purposes, and it joins a host of other development products deprecated by Microsoft. Many enjoyed and even still enjoy strong developer support. It's a subjective thing, but some of these products might include Visual Basic, Microsoft Liquid Motion, Microsoft Blend, Microsoft WebMatrix, Microsoft LightSwitch for Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Web (and maybe toss UWP into the mix).

The latter item in the above list, Expression Web, was even the subject of its own article ("Microsoft Abandons Expression Web and Front End Web Development") in which Silverlight was mentioned many times. For example, one comment in the 2012 article said: "Haven't you heard the .NET developers' outcry a year ago about MS moving the application development focus from .NET to HTML/JS/CSS? Haven't you heard the angry Silverlight developers?"

'Will It Be the Next Silverlight?'
The first reminder came in reader comments in a Microsoft post about ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 6 Preview 7. A reader said he would need several things before he would use Blazor (web dev primarily with C# instead of JavaScript):

After that list, the developer commented: "Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy Blazor. But it still has ways to go until it can compete with other technologies, and I'm not sure how sure/committed MS is with it (will it be the next Silverlight?)."

'MAUI Will End Up in the Same Place as Silverlight'
The other reminder came four days ago in the Visual Studio Magazine article "Microsoft Replaces Xamarin Toolkits with New .NET MAUI Alternatives."

The open source .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) is a cross-platform framework for creating native mobile and desktop apps with C# and XAML, described by Microsoft as the evolution of Xamarin.Forms.

That striking coincidence speaks to the popularity of Silverlight. Even though some might argue that Microsoft's Silverlight deprecation was a sound business decision as the industry drifted away from the plugin approach (Flash, anyone?) in favor of more open, accessible tech like HTML5, Silverlight is still very much in the minds of many developers.

Silverlight Replacements
Just last year, for example, Userware, on a years-long quest to bring back Silverlight, announced an open source implementation of Silverlight based on WebAssembly called OpenSilver. Underneath a clock counting down to the end of Silverlight support in October, developers are told they have two migration options: do it yourself or sign up for "cost-effective" help (see graphic above).

However, the Silverlight replacement space might be thinning out. For example, on a Citrix forum last year, a developer asked about Any news on silverlight replacement? He said: "Hey, I would like to bring up this very old topic. Customers are looking for a HTML5 GUI for the ELM for a long time now. Is an update of the GUI still on the roadmap? And if so, when is it going to be released?"

Let It Go
Of course, all development tooling companies will come up with new products and technologies and then phase many of them out as the result of business decisions. Perhaps the most reasoned thinking about the fear of being "Silverlighted" came from Ed Charbeneau, then a Developer Advocate for Telerik, in a 2015 blog post titled "Microsoft Hates Enterprise Developers?"

Charbeneau, in discussing changes in ".NET Core 5" (which turned out not to be a thing, as .NET Core became just .NET), did not think that Microsoft hated enterprise developers, whom he basically advised to roll with the changes: