If you can believe it, the Silverlight page up on the Microsoft website is still up and running, with a promient warning - Prepare for Silverlight 5 end of support after October 2021.
I hope everyone is properly prepared at this point. For extra amusing points, the page also declares you can Build compelling touch-based apps built quickly using familiar tools and distributed through the Windows Phone Marketplace.
The installer isn't licensed for redistribution, and the download page is just a link to the end-of-support page.
I worked on WPF but never had the opportunity to use Silverlight too much.
At one point, in one of the very early versions, I had a demo page that would pull in an ADO.NET Data Services query via JavaScript and use that to populate Silverlight on the page. In that version, you could only load XAML and there was no .NET programmability - a simple fancy display was all we could do, some query showing a table with labels and a background gradient showing some associated value if I remember correctly.
Later, I believe we also had the opportunity to try it out when we were trading notes with the Rich Internet Application (RIA) folks, who supported Silverlight clients. ADO.NET Data Services was very schema and data oriented, allowing a decently rich query language, while the RIA folks were more procedure-oriented, being easier to lock down or express custom behaviors but (in my opinion at the time at least) with fewer opportunities for composition and expressiveness.
The Wikipedia page has some more of the history. It really came together relatively quickly for the amount of functionality it provided, although there was plenty of prior art in the other XAML-based stacks that Microsoft was working on at the time.
The development page is still up somehow, and a quick look at the namespaces in the .NET Framework library supported shows some of the lineage - Microsoft.Xna.Framework from the XNA from the video game development stuff, Microsoft.Phone.Data.Linq from the phone side of things, System.Data.Linq from the more enterprise data-access side of things, and of course System.Windows.Controls and friends for the UI framework model.
In the season of darker months and festivities - happy silver lights!
Tags: history