According to
Wikipedia Microsoft XNA ('XNA's Not Acronymed') is a set of tools with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates computer game development and management and Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework that provides functionality similar to those in Adobe Flash, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. Basically, both
XNA and Silverlight are frameworks that can be used by Windows Phone 7 for application and game development. You, as a developer or designer, should choose any of them depending on your specific task.
Next I would like to mention some major differences between those two frameworks, so it is easier for you to choose:
XNA
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- Greater performance for graphical elements
- Support for many image types
- Improved 3D support
- Text rendering using raster graphics
- Built-in game physics/tools support (for example for shaders, timers, collision detection, positional audio)
- Zune support
- Same development process for both Xbox and Windows Phone
- GPU - acceleration
- Greater memory manipulation, data array processing
- Combination of graphical models
- More possibilities for game development
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Silverlight
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- Browser based delivery on multiple platforms, application can be created for both: web and windows phone
- Vector graphics and vector text rendering
- Expression Design support
- Visual state support for graphical objects
- Data bindings
- Styles support
- Built-in controls like buttons, lists. Possibility to create user defined controls.
- Navigation framework
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