With the kickoff of the designer and developer conference MIX10 yesterday, the Silverlight team made several announcements, including the release of a Silverlight Pivot control and the announcement of the Silverlight 4 RC, which is now available for download.
So what’s new with the latest version of Silverlight? Quite a few things, actually – the full list is here if you’re interested (scroll down on that page). However, these are the top items that stood out for me:
- Webcam and microphone support
- Multicast streaming
- Multi-touch support
- Copy & Paste and Drag & Drop
- Offline DRM powered by PlayReady technology
- Control over aspects of the UI
- Read and write files to your My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos folders
- Ability to run other desktop programs (e.g. Office)
- Full Visual Studio integration
- Performance optimizations – starts faster and runs 200% faster than Silverlight 3
- Silverlight for Windows Phones
As that last item shows, Silverlight will be available on Windows Phones, which will bring the following:
- High quality video and audio using a wide range of codecs, DRM and IIS Smooth Streaming
- Deep Zoom for enhanced reading and photo browsing experiences
- Vector and Bitmap Graphics and animation
- Hardware acceleration for video and graphics
- Accelerometer for motion sensing
- Multi-touch
- Camera and microphone
- Location awareness
- Push notifications
- Native phone functionality
- Silverlight can also utilize the XNA Framework to support games using 3D and 2D sprite graphics.
Also new is the Silverlight Pivot control. Pivot, a data visualization technology demonstrated first at PDC, will be available as a Silverlight control by this summer. Silverlight developers interested in using this technology can begin the prototyping process using the Live Labs Pivot app which is available now.
