Today during his PDC keynote ScottGu announced the beta of Silverlight 4. That includes previews of;
- Silverlight 4 Runtime
- Silverlight 4 SDK
- Silverlight 4 Developer tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
- WCF RIA Services ( RIA Services just got its own home page and a slightly different name )
Of course, your one-stop-shop for all things Silverlight should still be http://www.silverlight.net but here’s a shortcut to the download to get all of the bits;
and you should definitely check out Tim’s blog post for the full info.
It’s a very exciting release – there are a tonne of new features in Silverlight 4 itself that extend Silverlight’s existing abilities and especially in the realm of business applications. Some examples ( unordered );
- the ability to run applications “Trusted” outside of the browser to allow Silverlight applications a richer integration with the local machine
- the ability to take control of printing from a Silverlight application
- the ability for a Silverlight application to interact with the local webcam and microphone
- the ability for a Silverlight application to display notification ( “toast” ) windows and to have more control over its out-of-browser window
- Silverlight applications acting as a drop target for drag operations
- Silverlight applications having secure access to the clipboard
- better support for copy-and-paste in Silverlight applications
- increased networking support such as;
- support for authentication in the client network stack
- support for a TCP channel for WCF
- support for UDP multicastingrich support for text ( and mixed content ) display with the new Rich Text Area control
- support for HTML display and interaction with the new WebBrowser control
- better data-binding with support for IDataErrorInfo and more
- better mousewheel integration
- support for right-to-left layouts to support more languages/cultures
- improvements around DRM of media and how that works offline
- integration of new C# and VB languages features ( like the C# 4 ‘dynamic’ ability )
- control enhancements like enhancements to the DataGrid
and beyond that there’s also the WCF RIA Services Preview to add into the mix.
That’s a lot to think about 🙂 In the meantime, I’ve been making some rough notes on some of this new functionality in the form of blog posts that I’ll attempt to publish those here today/tomorrow – some of those are a little sketchy but hopefully it’ll provide a small kick-start around some of the new features.
