Great web site to get started – http://silverlight.net/getstarted/
Allows you to interface with ASP.NET, and eventually the CLR.
Runtime allows you to run apps in Silverlight.
Page contains Runtimes, Developer Tools, Designer Tools, and SDKs
VS 2008 is geared towards Silverlight 1.1.
Silverlight is listed as a template under C# in VS 2005
Download Silverlight Tools Alpha for development in VS 2008
When developing in VS 2005, ASP Futures release gives some additional functionality, but is not required for base development.
Goal is 200,000,000 downloads by 2008
1.0 is media and JS based.
1.1 allows you to use CLR, with some of the advanced functionality taken out.
Many of the UI controls are not currently available, but 3rd parties, such as componentOne, are releasing UI packages.
Some additional URLs:
http://silverlight.net/samples/1.1/chess/run/default.html
http://silverlight.net/blogs/
Silverlight is supported on IE, Firefox, Safari, though Safari has been said to have issues on PC. Not officially supported on PowerPC. Novell has got a pretty good implementation of Silverlight in Linux called Moonlight