Today at the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas, we unveiled more details of the Windows® Phone 7 Series by announcing Silverlight as the primary platform for developing applications on the device platform. The combination of the Silverlight platform, Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Expression Blend development tools, and Windows Phone software and hardware, together with the Windows Phone Marketplace, completes Microsoft’s vision of delivering the premier mobile application development experience.

We also unveiled a release candidate version of Silverlight 4 in anticipation of the full release, which will be available next month.

All of you will now be able to download the Silverlight 4 RC, the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, and Expression Blend 4 Beta to get ready for the future and begin developing high-performance, compelling mobile applications.

Features of Silverlight for Windows Phone

Silverlight for Windows Phone will support core Silverlight features while optimizing for capabilities specific to the Windows Phone 7 Series. Feature highlights include the following:

  • Hardware-accelerated video with multi-codec digital rights management (DRM) and Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming support
  • Vector and bitmap graphics with perspective 3-D
  • Multi-touch support with Accelerometer, an intuitive control that responds to motion
  • Deep Zoom support for rich reading experiences
  • Camera and microphone support
  • Notification Service for pushing information to the phone, regardless of whether or not an application is running
  • Integration with the core Windows Phone 7 Series experience features such as hubs

New Features in the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate

Silverlight 4 delivers powerful features to application developers, bringing innovative platform capabilities to browser-based experiences. New features in the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate include:

  • Silverlight 4 affirms its position as the natural choice for building business applications on the Web: Further Rich TextBox enhancements, graphics and printing enhancements plus networking enhancements.
  • Silverlight 4 introduces additional capabilities that enable developers to create richer, more appealing, high-performance interactive and innovative media experiences:
    • Official support of the Google Chrome browser
    • Hardware acceleration for Deep Zoom
    • Output protection support for protected video path to fully control the content from source to display
  • Silverlight 4 extends out-of-browser capabilities pioneered in Silverlight 3 that enable Web sites to establish closer, more persistent relationships with customers without any additional runtime download or the need to write applications in a different way.

Resources:

You can get details of the new opportunities for both developers and designers on the Windows Phone 7 Series platform at  Windows Phone for Developers & Microsoft Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone

Press materials around these announcements can be accessed on Microsoft PressPass site at:

Learn more about the Expression Blend 4 Beta

Download the Silverlight 4 RC SDK and corresponding updates