On November 18, 2009, the day all geeks touched down in LA to become a part of PDC (Professional Developers Conference), Microsoft was in a rush to unveil the beta version of Silverlight 4. It’s been 4 month since Microsoft presented Silverlight 3 and now we are witnessing the 4’s issue release. The motives for Microsoft’s accelerated cross-platform development are shaded. Is it a well-planned project of upgrading web application framework with a glace of web-developers and web-designers’ feedbacks, or is it simply a marketing trick to make Silverilght a household word – we really find it hard to answer. The best way to reveal the truth is to analyzing of “what’s so fresh” in Silverlight 4 beta. According to Silverlight’s official website, there is a great number of absolutely new features. Here is some of them:
- 30% faster startup time
- Support for the Google Chrome browser
- Integrated web cam and microphone support
- Support for right-click support
- Mouse wheel input for all standard Silverlight controls
- Drag and drop support
- Drop target support to enable streaming of selected files
- Programmatic printing support
- Programmatic access to the clipboard
- Rich text editing
- REST enhancements
- WCF RIA services
- Offline digital rights management
The Silverlight 4 beta is claimed to be a developer release only, but web-designers have also found something usefull in 4 release. Antoni Dol (honored web designer from the Netherlands) has marked out 10 Silverlight 4 beta top features for designers:
- Printing support
- Implicit Style
- Fluid UI States for ItemsControl
- ViewBox
- Rich Text Area control
- Webcam and Microphone support
- CompositeTransform
- Webbrowser control and HTML brush
- Command property on buttons and hyperlink
- StringFormat, TargetNullValue, FallbackValue on Data Binding.
To find out more about all these exciting features we recommend you to visit official MS Silverlight website.
Tags: Silverlight 4