From SDTimes, First showing of Silverlight 4 for developers at PDC By
David Worthington
LOS ANGELES – Silverlight 4 broke out today at the
Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. Developers can now access local
resources, including hardware, Windows 7 APIs and Component Object Model
applications.
Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's
.NET Developer Platform, detailed Silverlight 4 features, which target three
key areas: expanding beyond the browser, displaying rich media and supporting
business applications.
Silverlight 3 introduced a secure sandbox mode that
allowed applications to be run on the desktop for Mac OS X and Windows.
Silverlight 4 goes further with a trusted mode that opens the sandbox so that
applications can access it, Guthrie said.
On Windows, applications may read and write to the file
system, access hardware devices, integrate with Windows 7 APIs (such as
location), and integrate with COM components.
COM access gives developers the opportunity to access
millions of Visual Basic, Win32 and custom .NET applications, said Forrester
principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond. COM access is fine from a security
perspective, provided it is turned off by default and requires consent, he
added.
Those capabilities compare favorably to Adobe’s AIR
platform for desktop-enabled rich Internet applications, Hammond said. Beyond
the desktop, access to local hardware contributes to Silverlight's media
experience.
Silverlight applications can now access webcams with
client-side input access. Transformation encoding happens on the client-side.
Guthrie demonstrated an application that morphed his picture, and he uploaded
it to his Twitter profile.
Another application scanned a barcode and invoked a Web
service to compare product prices at online retailers.
Microsoft has added smooth streaming for video
playback. The bitrate is automatically adjusted as processor and network
conditions change, Guthrie explained. He also previewed video streaming to an
iPhone.
There’s also an assortment of new controls and
capabilities for business users. Silverlight applications can now print, as
well as read from the clipboard; the platform now supports drag-and-drop and
accepts mouse-wheel input.
Another highlight was an embedded HTML hosting control.
Guthrie demonstrated Flash video being played within a Silverlight application.
At the lower level, Silverlight 4 includes UDP
multicast for peer-to-peer scenarios, REST enhancements via ADO.NET data
services, and Windows Communication Foundation RIA services that enables access
to data for queries, changes and custom operations.
Microsoft also tweaked Silverlight’s performance by
added JIT optimizations in the Common Language Runtime compiler for Silverlight, Guthrie said. “It’s almost twice as fast for processor-intensive
things.”
Assemblies are shared between Silverlight 4 and .NET 4,
and Microsoft will ship a WYSIWYG design surface with Visual Studio 2010.
Microsoft is also adding code completion for data binding expressions.
Beta 1 of Silverlight 4 is available for download. A
new plug-in has been developed for Google Chrome. The final version of
Silverlight 4 is slated to ship in the first half of 2010, Guthrie said.
Internet Explorer 9 was also previewed at PDC.
Microsoft is focusing on improving standards support, graphics and JavaScript
performance, Guthrie said. CSS 3 and HTML 5 are standards that Microsoft will
be incorporating into the browser.
In an effort to distinguish the IE user experience, IE
9’s rendering engine provides hardware-accelerated GDI drawing that is made
possible through DirectX APIs. “Hardware shines through on the browser even
with standards-based rendering,” Guthrie said.
Adobe Flash is a technology to add animation and
interactivity to your web applications. Flash provides a truly amazing cross
browser cross platform support to create RIA’s. Silverlight also provides
similar features. Silverlight however extends these features by providing a
first-class programming framework that incorporates .NET. That means that you
can write code that will execute at client side using a .NET language.
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5