New Features for Silverlight 5 Beta

December 2, 2010  /  Leave a response

The exiting, wonderful & powerful technology for developing RIA (Rich Internet Applications) is Silverlight, All the developer around the world enjoyed with Silverlight 4 & earlier versions, personally my self i love to work with Silverlight & develop the rich UX for Web, now it’s the time for the new version.

Today(Dec-2nd-2010) ScottGu announced the new features of Silverlight 5 Beta in the keynote Silverlight FireStarter event. Silverlight 5 beta will be available in the first half of next year, and the final release will ship in the second half of 2011.

Silverlight 5 introduces more than 40 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications top features in the browser, dramatic video quality and performance improvements, and features that improve developer productivity.

New Features at a glance

Improved Media Experiences (Silverlight 5 offers improved media support and rich UI capabilities)

• Hardware Decode and presentation of H.264 improve performance for lower-power devices to render high-definition video using GPU support.
• TrickPlay allows video to be played at different speeds and supports fast-forward and rewind. At up to twice the speed, audio pitch correction allows users to watch videos while preserving a normal audio pitch.
• Improved power awareness prevents the screen saver from being shown while watching video and allows the computer to sleep when video is not active.
• Remote-control support allows users to control media playback.
• Digital rights management advancements allow seamless switching between DRM media sources.

Business Application Development(Silverlight 5 is Microsoft’s solution for building next-generation business applications).

Text improvements make it possible to build rich magazine-style text layouts:

• Multicolumn text and linked text container allow text to flow around other elements.
• Tracking/leading set precisely how far apart each character is for full creative control.
• Text clarity is improved with Pixel Snapping.
• Text layout performance is significantly improved.
• OpenType support has been enhanced.

Support for Postscript vector printing enables users to create reports and documents, including the ability to create a virtual print view different from what is shown on the screen.

Applications can now work the way users expect with added support for double-click and Combobox type ahead.

Model View ViewModel (MVVM) and Databinding enhancements allow more work to be done more easily via XAML:

• Debugging support now allows breakpoints to be set on a binding, so you can step through binding failures.
• Implicit DataTemplates allow templates to be created across an application to support a particular type by default.
• Ancestor RelativeSource allows, for example, a DataTemplate to bind to a property on the control that contains it.
• Binding in style setters allows bindings to be used within styles to reference other properties.
• The DataContextChanged event is being introduced. Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers, enabling cutting-edge MVVM support.

Networking and Windows Communication Foundation enhancements:

• Reduced network latency by using a background thread for networking.
• WS-Trust support: Security Assertion Markup Language authentication token.

Silverlight 5 performance improvements include:

• Reduced network latency by using a background thread for networking.
• XAML parser improvements that speed up startup and runtime performance.
• Support for 64-bit operating systems.

Graphics improvements:

• Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerated 3-D application programming interface (API) provides rich graphics on the Web for building advanced data visualizations and rich user experience (UI).
• Immediate mode graphics API allows direct rendering to the GPU.
• Hardware acceleration is enabled in windowless mode with Internet Explorer 9.

Silverlight offers a new class of trusted applications that brings desktop capabilities to the browser for the firstese features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks:

• Host HTML content as a Web browser control within the Silverlight application. HTML pages, such as help content or e-mail, can be integrated within the application.
• Read and write files to the user’s My Documents folder, making it easier to find media files or create local copies of reports.
• Launch Microsoft Office and other desktop programs. Users can open Microsoft Outlook and create an e-mail message, or send a report to Word utilizing the power of Office.
• Access devices and other system capabilities by calling into application COM components. Users can access a USB security card reader or a bar-code scanner.
• Enjoy full keyboard support in full screen, which enables richer kiosk and media viewing applications.
• Call existing unmanaged code directly from within Silverlight with PInvoke.

Out-of-browser trusted applications are further enhanced:

• Existing unmanaged code can be called directly from within Silverlight with PInvoke.
• Child Window support allows multiple windows to be launched from the application.

Tools improvements include:

• Microsoft Visual Studio profiling support including CPU, memory, thread contention.
• Visual Studio Team Test support.

The above are the exiting list of features going to be introduced into Silverlight 5 Beta, Welcome to Silverlight 5 Beta.