Silverlight 3 beta is here with some oomph

This week at MIX we revealed a beta version of Silverlight 3. This version addresses many asks we heard from you from your Silverlight 2 experience.

There are tons of new things (in a package simiar in size):

Media

• Smooth streamign suppot (working with IIS media services)
• More HD with H.264
• GPU acceleration for video rendering and resizing (full screen HD is enabled by that)
• Raw AV pipeline (you can write your own codec in managed code, if you are writing one, please let me know about it)
• PlayReady DRM for VC-1 media

Graphics

• Perspective 3D transform
• Bitmap caching (improving speed)
• Bitmap APIs
• Pixel Shaders(GPU based)
• Dynamic Styling and Theming
• Improved text rendering (you will see more of that in the RTW release)

Application Development

• Over 60 controls
• Search SEO support
• Data form controls
• DLL Caching
• Binary XML
• Better data binding
• Better Accessibility

Out of browser

• Run your SL app on the desktop on Mac and Windows
• Start menu and desktop icons
• Sandboxed envinronment
• Connectivity detection
• Widnows 7 integration (touch)
• No admin smooth installation and update

You can access the bits on http://silverlight.net  

This is a great release and we have more good stuff in the pipe. Stay tuned.

Barak