Alain Hufkens {Rich Interactive Applications Developer}

Silverlight 4 beta announced

Today at the Microsoft Professional Developer conference, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of Silverlight 4 Beta. Yes it's still a beta but the feature list is quite impressive:

• Webcam and Microphone access.
• Mousewheel and Right-click support.
• HTML Hosting in WebBrowser (not really sure if this is good or bad, cause it brings an embedded IE into every browser)
• Elevated thrust, Local File access, COM interoperability, Notifications "Toast" API.
• Network authentication, basically support for basic authentication, ...
• Right-to-left and bi-directional text
• Enhanced data-binding features.
• Official Google Chrome support.
• For more details and an extensive list of the new features check Tim Heuer's blog or the Silverlight.net site.

Some of the features were just missing and have been available in the Flash platform for a long time, but I am impressed by the speed that those features get implemented by the Silverlight development team. They have also added a lot of offline features that moves Silverlight even more towards Adobe AIR. One advantage I see here is that, once  a user has installed the Silverlight plug-in he/she doesn't need an extra installation for running offline applications with access to the file system and elevated access.

I haven't seen the file size of the Silverlight 4 beta plug-in, but I am definitely curious to see how they can squeeze in all those features and still keep the download small enough.

If you want to try this out you will need at least the following tools:

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010
• Expression Blend for .NET 4 Preview