project , aimed at creating an open version of the platform , whose development was discontinued by Microsoft in 2011, with support continuing until 2021. Similarly to with Adobe Flash, the development of Silverlight was halted in favor of standard web technologies. In its time, an open implementation of Silverlight was already being developed based on Mono — , but its development due to the lack of demand for the technology from users.
The OpenSilver project has made another attempt to revive the Silverlight technology, which allows creating interactive web applications using C#, XAML, and .NET. One of the main goals of the project is to extend the life of existing Silverlight applications amidst the cessation of platform support and the discontinuation of plugin support by browsers. Nevertheless, supporters of .NET technologies and the C# language can also use OpenSilver to create new programs.
OpenSilver is based on the code of open projects () and (part of ASP.NET Core), and for execution in the browser, the applications are compiled into intermediate code . OpenSilver is developed alongside the , which allows running C#/XAML applications in the browser by compiling them to JavaScript. OpenSilver utilizes the existing code base of CSHTML5, replacing the components that compile to JavaScript with WebAssembly.
Project Code under the MIT license. Compiled web applications can run in any desktop and mobile browsers that support WebAssembly, but currently, compilation is only carried out on Windows using Visual Studio 2019. The current version supports approximately 60% of the most requested Silverlight API. This year, support for Open RIA services and Telerik UI is planned, as well as synchronization with the latest code base of Blazor and Mono for WebAssembly projects, which is expected to support ahead-of-time compilation (AOT), potentially increasing performance by up to 30 times.
Source: opennet.ru
