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
