Alain Hufkens {Rich Interactive Applications Developer}

What’s new in Silverlight 3

Today was the day of the MIX conference by Microsoft in Las Vegas. After the Techdays last week I was a bit disappointed in the Silverlight presentations. But on MIX they announced a lot of new features that will end up in the next version of Silverlight. I have found this list on a couple of blogs from Microsoft employees. Some of the stuff we can already do in Flash but other features might become interesting in the future.

• Video/Audio. Silverlight 3 now also supports the H.264 video format in addition to VC-1. It also supports the AAC audio format; both this and H.264 are implemented within the MP4 container format (i.e. .MP4 and .M4A files).
• GPU Acceleration. This is an opt-in feature that is available within the Silverlight 3 runtime, both in-browser and out-of-browser.You can add a parameter EnableGPUAcceleration, and set it to true, to enable final surface draw GPU acceleration. This could be something that can out performe the Flash player.
• 3D Support. Silverlight 3 includes perspective 3D, which gives you much of the benefit of 3D without the “productivity penalty” of having to write it from scratch.
• Animation Easing. There’s now a series of easing functions.
• Custom Dialogs. We now have SaveFileDialog support in Silverlight 3. For security reasons (because Silverlight runs in the sandbox), we don’t return a path to the developer.
• Effects. Effects (introduced in Silverlight 3) provide a low-level way to impact visual behavior (rather than functional behavior). We provide drop shadow and blur effects out of the box, but you can also create your own.Custom effects are implemented as HLSL shaders – these can be compiled into byte code using a DirectX SDK utility, which Silverlight 3 then consumes. Something similar to Pixelbender?
• Pixel and Media APIs. You can now read/write pixels from a bitmap. There are two ways this functionality is exposed: either as an in-memory bitmap or by saving a visual to a bitmap. Also supported are raw audio/video APIs that enable dynamic sound generation, custom video codecs or indeed alpha video channels.
• Local Messaging. One common challenge is messaging across multiple Silverlight plug-ins. In Silverlight 3, we now support “named pipes”-style messaging across not just objects on the same page, but even multiple Silverlight instances across multiple browsers.
• Out of Browser. A user can start a Silverlight out-of-browser “application” either by right-clicking on the Silverlight content, or by clicking on a custom button within the application itself. So now we can have Silverlight applications running on the Mac that can run offline.
• Tooling. The Silverlight 3 tools will introduce a new compression algorithm that will reduce the size of XAP files by 10-30%. So that's great news because Silverlight xap file tend to grow large very quick as they use extra dll files.
• eclipse4SL: the Mac version of eclipse4SL is available for download, so now you can develop Silverlight applications on the Mac.

UPDATE: Read more about these features in detail in Tim Heuer's blog post: A guide to Silverlight 3 new features.

It's a nice feature list, but most of this stuff can also be achieved using the Adobe Flash Platform. But given the fact that the .NET core runtime is a powerfull development platform and the vast amount of developers, we should see some cool stuff coming in the future. The only feature that I haven't read anything about is Silverlight for Mobile. Maybe I missed it, or maybe it is something for later on.