Mix11: Silverlight 5 beta
Silverlight April 13th, 2011
This is the part 2 of my post about today’s Mix keynote – first one is about Windows Phone 7 improvements. Now let’s talk about Silverlight 5 !
New features:
- Multiple Windows support (for Out Of Browser scenarios)
- Ancestor RelativeSource binding
- Implicit DataTemplates
- ClickCount for mouse events
- Binding on Style setter
- Realtime sound (low-latency audio)
- Variable speed playback
- Linked text containers
- Custom markup extensions
- XAML binding debugging
- 3D graphics API (based on XNA)
Other features
- HW video decode for H.264
- Multi-core background JIT
- Improved graphic stacks
- XAML parser performance improvements
- Network latency optimizations
- Text layout performance improvements
Download everything you need right now: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-5-beta/
April 13th, 2011 at 7:59 pm
So they’re eventually adding most of the WPF features that were missing in Silverlight… that’s very good news! Until now I was reluctant to use SL because I found it frustrating compared to WPF, but this new version could make me reconsider my position…
April 14th, 2011 at 4:28 pm
Yes I think it’s a good news… for Silverlight. We’re still missing some features in WPF (like plane projection for example) and I think the positioning of WPF versus SL OutOfBrowser is not very clear… I feel like something is going to change with the next release of Window, but hopefully we’ll have more details during the next PDC in September…
April 18th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
Unfortunately, Microsoft appears to have no plans to expand the platform reach of this excellent technology. There was not a single word mentioned at Mix about Silverlight appearing on Android or iOS. In fact, it seems Silverlight is going in the opposite direction.
April 18th, 2011 at 3:50 pm
Al,
I think going to the iOS platform is just impossible because of Apple’s strategy. In my opinion, MS strategy has changed in the past few months because they changed from “SL to many platforms” to “SL for our platforms (Windows, WP7, XBox) and HTML5 for all other platforms”.