Christmas came early this year for all Microsoft techies out there. Not only the releases of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but also the imminent releases of .Net 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and Office 2010 product families. Not content with giving us all of this to play with Microsoft at PDC 2009 announced a whole raft of new betas including the new like Sharepoint 2010 and my personal favourites Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services.
For those who still doubt Microsoft's commitment to the Silverlight platform, prepare to be proved wrong. Microsoft is keeping the blistering pace of a year-on-year product cycles for its flagship RIA platform. Determined to make it into what it promised at the very outset: WPF - Everywhere.
So what is new in this release? Well, the focus is still very much on introducing more LOB-type features, but there is al lot of new stuff all over the place. One of the key announcements is the support for Google Chrome which will be fully supported from now on. Another welcome item on the checklist is that Silverlight 4 will be a lot faster in both in loading and running applications compared to the current version.
Some of the key new features in Silverlight 4 beta 1 include:
- Support for printing: Yes! Finally we can print anything we want with full support for the browser’s standard printer dialogues
- Enhanced data binding support including Command Binding with Command Parameters. This will probably sound incredibly geeky, but this was number 1 on my list of requests. It will make the M-V-VM pattern so much easier to implement without having to resort to frameworks like Prism.
- WCF RIA Services (previously known as .Net RIA Services) will be included in the release
- Support for webcams and microphones, and extended support for streaming video within Silverlight
- Al lot more components and controls (now about 60 in total) will be included in the standard control set and even more will follow in the Silverlight Toolkit later on. The most important new ones are:
- A new fully featured rich text box control with support for hyperlinks and images
- A new masked edit control
- The Managed Extensibility Framework, which is new in .Net Framework 4.0, will also be available client side in Silverlight 4, enabling highly flexible composite applications
- There will be support for HTML rendering within the Silverlight control – whether this will be in the form of a fully featured browser control is still a bit unclear, but its welcome for things like product descriptions and help text none the less
- A number of the features will as the user for elevated privileges, making it in effect into a trusted application:
- Silverlight will now allow trusted applications to access the user’s profile folders like My Documents, My Pictures, etc.. directly without using open file dialogues and streams
- There will be support for client side COM-interop, subject to user approval
- The ability to send email and access installed Office applications from the user’s desktop
The tooling has also improved a lot. Much of which has to do with Visual Studio 2010 and not so much Silverlight 4, but still this was a major hurdle to getting started with Silverlight in the first place. Finally we will have a design surface for Silverlight that is just as easy to use as the WinForms designer.
There is no doubting the effort Microsoft is putting into this platform. It is maturing very rapidly from an oddity into the a prime candidate for LOB front end development, as well as retaining and improving all of its multimedia credentials for more user-interactive applications.
For more information check out the PDC and Silverlight 4 beta websites at:
By Nick Verschueren, .Net Solutions Architect