New Features Announced for Silverlight 5 Beta

With the world moving towards HTML 5 for Rich Media, Microsoft announced Silverlight 5 beta. Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful platform for creating and delivering rich Internet applications and media experiences on the Web. Silverlight 5 builds on the foundation of Silverlight 4 for building business applications, premium media applications and applications that reach beyond the browser. Silverlight 5 introduces more than 40 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications with desktop features in the browser, dramatic video quality and performance improvements, and features that improve developer productivity. Picked up a few new features to come from Silverlight Website.

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.

Silverlight 5 is Microsoft’s solution for building next-generation business applications:

• Silverlight 5 text (bottom) has improved clarity.
• Fluid user interface enables smoother animation within the UI. Inter-Layout Transitions allow developers to specify animations to apply when elements are added, removed or re-ordered within a layout. This provides smoother user experiences when, for example, items are inserted into a list.

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.

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.

The Silverlight 5 beta will be available sometime in 2011 H1, and more information will be available at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/