Framework · 2007–2013 · Web Boom
Silverlight
.NET in the browser via plugin. Netflix used it; the web moved on anyway.
Silverlight failed because the web stopped tolerating plugins and Microsoft pivoted to Azure instead of fighting Apple. Teams bet on a runtime with an expiration date. The costly part was rewriting rich clients twice in one decade.
Cost of the fad
Enterprises built internal dashboards and streaming pilots on Silverlight just as HTML5 and iOS said no to plugins. Migration projects burned budgets Flash already warned them about.
Case studies
Patterns
Context
The browser ate the desktop
The web became the default delivery surface. LAMP and Rails made shipping cheap; Ajax made pages feel like apps; SOAP/SOA tried to enterprise-ify the wire. REST won by being debuggable with curl. This decade invented the modern product cadence — and the habit of treating every new framework as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Platform · 1996–2020
Adobe Flash
Animations, games, and video in a plugin the web learned to hate. Steve Jobs wrote the obituary; HTML5 dug the grave.
Language · 2000–now
C# / .NET
Microsoft's managed stack grew up — cross-platform, open source, and still dominant in enterprise Windows shops.
Framework · 2011–2022
Xamarin
C# for iOS and Android before Flutter and React Native won the cross-platform narrative.