The last few weeks, there was a lot of buzz around the future of Silverlight. Although there were some official comments, the rumors kept going. For the remaining skeptics, what can be a better answer than the announcement of Silverlight 5.
A t the Silverlight FireStarter event Microsoft announced the timeline for Silverlight 5 in 2011. Silverlight 5 was the main subject of Scott Guthrie’s keynote where Microsoft demoed many of the coming new features and capabilities. Silverlight 5 will be in beta the first half of 2011 and ship early in the second half of 2011.
Some of the impressive improvements(note especially XAML debugging):
Silverlight 5 Media improvements:
- Hardware Decode & Presentation of H.264 performance improvements using GPU support
- Trickplay with fast-forward and rewind support w/normal audio pitch
- Improved power awareness
- Remote-control support
- Digital Rights Management advancements
Application Development improvements:
- Smoother UI experiences with smoother animation
- Text improvements
- Multi-column text & linked container text
- Text clarity improved
- OpenType support enhanced
- Support for Postscript vector printing
- Added support for double-click and combobox
- MVVM and Databinding enhancements
- Networking and WCF enhancements
- Reduced network latency using a background thread
- WS-Trust support
- Performance Improvements
- XAML parser improvements
- Support for 64-bit OSes
- Graphics Improvements
- GPU API
- Direct rendering on GPU
- Hardware acceleration on Internet Explorer 9
- New class of trusted applications
- Host HTML content as a browser control
- Read/Write to users My Documents folder
- Launch Microsoft Office and other programs
- Ability to call into application COM components gaining access to system capabilities and devices
- Full keyboard support in full screen
- Call unmanaged code with PInvoke
- Out-of-browser trusted applications enhancements
- Call unmanaged code with PInvoke
- Child Windows support
- Tool improvements
- Visual Studio profiling support for CPU, memory, thread contention
- Visual Studio Team Test support