Silverlight 3.0 Beta Available

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For those whomsoever Silverlight x.x may concern, this is the news for you. Microsoft has released Silverlight 3.0 today at MIX09 with numerous new features and improvements.

In addition to 60+ new UI controls and new features, I am really excited with the following features:

  • Silverlight would NOT be isolated from Web 2.0.  With the support of deep linking (making a hyperline that points to a specific page or image on another website), you can bookmark a page.  You can make your database driven Silverlight contents as search engine compatiable.
  • Binary XML.  This compressed one allow you to pass reduced size of data on the wire.

Important Note

Once you installed Silverlight 3.0 Beta tools for Visual Studio 2008, Silverlight 3.0 is the only choice for you.  You cannot use Silverlight 2.0 SDK.

New Features

  1. 3D. This allows to place contents on 3D plane and you can do transformations without writing any additional code.
  2. Easing functions for Animations.  These functions allow you to create and use so many specialized animation effects such as spring and bounce.
  3. Pixel Shaders. Based on HLSL (High Level Shader Language), you can do effects like blur, drop shadow and custom effects.  The instruction sets are targeted for GPU.
  4. New Bitmap API. These APIs allow you to edit photo bitmaps.
  5. Bitmap Caching. This allows to cache UI elements which improve performance.
  6. Out of the box. Now you can make your Silverlight applications as a stand-alone web component which can be executed out of browser.
  7. H264 Video Support. This codec support enables to deliver MPEG-4 quality with a frame size up to four times greater.

Improvements

  1. Simple control skinning.
  2. Improved text rendering and font support.
  3. Application library caching. This reduce application size which imrove performance.
  4. Enhanced deep zoom.
  5. Communication between two Silverlight applications on same client.

Download the SDK and VS 2008 SP1 tools at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=11dc7151-dbd6-4e39-878f-5081863cbb5d.

Start learning this beta SDK at http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx

Happy Coding!.