During the keynote at TechEd 2008 there were a lot of announcements made. The most interesting for me was about Silverlight. You can read more about the other announcements on Somasegar’s Weblog.
This was the official announcement about Silverlight:
Silverlight 2 beta 2 – This is going to be available later in the week with a commercial Go Live license. Silverlight 2 beta 2 will be used to power the unprecedented online experience NBC Universal is creating for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. To help developers take full advantage of Silverlight, we are also making available Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview and Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008.
According to this post from the nibbles blog we will have a lot of new features:
- UI Framework: Beta 2 includes improvements in animation support, error handling and reporting, automation and accessibility support, keyboard input support, and general performance. This release also provides more compatibility between Silverlight and WPF.
- Rich Controls: Beta 2 includes a new templating model called Visual State Manager that allows for easier templating for controls. Other features include the introduction of TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort, performance increases and more. Controls are now in the runtime instead of packaged with the application.
- Networking Support: Beta 2 includes improved Cross Domain support and security enhancements, upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications (“push” from server to Silverlight client).
- Rich Base Class Library: Beta 2 includes improved threading abilities, LINQ-to-JSON, ADO.NET Data Services support, better support for SOAP, and various other improvements to make networking and data handling easier.
- Deep Zoom: Beta 2 introduces a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles, as well as a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom. Better notification for sub-images enter the view is another improvement in Silverlight 2 Beta 2.
In a nutshell you can say that I am a flexible developer with broad interests in new emerging technologies. At the moment I am focusing on Mobile Apps and Games.
