Silverlight China — A plain-English reference for the Silverlight era

A plain-English reference for the Silverlight era — and what to run instead

Silverlight Migration Complexity Scorer

Answer these questions about your legacy Silverlight application. The score gives a rough sense of how involved a migration to a modern framework is likely to be — useful for framing the first planning conversation, not for producing an estimate.

This is a rough orientation tool based on factors that commonly drive migration effort. Real project scope depends on your specific codebase, team, and requirements — have engineers who can read the code assess it before making commitments.

This site began life in the late 2000s as a community hub for Silverlight developers, back when browser plugins were how rich web applications got built. Silverlight itself is gone now — Microsoft ended support on October 12, 2021 — but the applications built with it did not all disappear on schedule. Plenty of internal line-of-business tools, dashboards, and training systems are still sitting on file shares and intranets, and the people who inherit them have the same questions: why won't this run anymore, what replaced it, and how big a job is it to move off?

That is what this site covers. The guides explain, in plain language, what happened to Silverlight and Internet Explorer, why modern browsers dropped plugins in favor of WebAssembly, and how the realistic migration paths — Blazor for the web, WPF for the desktop — actually compare. Nothing here assumes you were part of the original project.

If you are trying to size up an old application, start with the Silverlight Migration Complexity Scorer. Answer a few questions about the app and it gives you a rough sense of whether you are looking at a light port or a full rewrite — a useful first conversation to have before anyone opens an editor.