Does latest version of Silverlight Depend in any way on .Net 3.0, 3.5?

Question

If you read the release notes from the Feb 18th release of Silverlight, you will see a line that states:

graceful failures when attempting to use features that require .Net Framework 3.0 or 3.5 on machines that do not have either framework installed

What does this mean? Surely Silverlight has no direct dependencies to the full .Net 3.0 or 3.5 framework. How could it when it runs on OS X and there are suppose to be no differences between running on Windows vs. OS X?

Anybody know something about this?

Answer 1

I can't speak for the creditability of the site, but I found this link that states:

A common question about Silverlight is - "Does .NET Framework installation is required in order to use Silverlight?". The answer to this is no.

A cross platform version of the .NET Framework is included in the 4MB Silverlight 1.1 download, which means you do not need to have anything extra installed on the client.

The Silverlight version of the .NET framework includes the same CLR engine that ships with the full .NET Framework, and a subset of the .NET Framework namespace libraries.

I also found this site that explains while .NET is not required at run time, it is required at build time.

Answer 2

The silverlight runtime's basically a mini version of the .NET runtime. If you run C# code that does something that needs a feature that's not part of the subset, it tries not to blow up now.

Various subsets of the .NET runtime have been ported to non-Windows systems, Silverlight's just the most widely-known one.

Answer 3

Jeff - short answer: NO. In the release notes this comment refers to UIAutomation implementations in Silverlight, not the core features.