I think the difference between MFC and WinForms, compared to Silverlight is that former are still widely used. albeit less than in the past with a lot more prev

I think the difference between MFC and WinForms, compared to Silverlight is that former are still widely used. albeit less than in the past with a lot more prevalence of web based applications. Silverlight in other hand is a technology no modern web browsers support (in the same camp with gradually deprecated Flash and everything that requires plugins.), and perhaps to Microsoft it's a lot less justifiable to update it beyond security update.