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First showing of Silverlight 4 for developers at PDC


By David Worthington
November 18, 2009 — 
LOS ANGELES – Silverlight 4 broke out today at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. Developers can now access local resources, including hardware, Windows 7 APIs and Component Object Model applications.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, detailed Silverlight 4 features, which target three key areas: expanding beyond the browser, displaying rich media and supporting business applications.

Silverlight 3 introduced a secure sandbox mode that allowed applications to be run on the desktop for Mac OS X and Windows. Silverlight 4 goes further with a trusted mode that opens the sandbox so that applications can access it, Guthrie said.

On Windows, applications may read and write to the file system, access hardware devices, integrate with Windows 7 APIs (such as location), and integrate with COM components.

COM access gives developers the opportunity to access millions of Visual Basic, Win32 and custom .NET applications, said Forrester principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond. COM access is fine from a security perspective, provided it is turned off by default and requires consent, he added.

Those capabilities compare favorably to Adobe’s AIR platform for desktop-enabled rich Internet applications, Hammond said. Beyond the desktop, access to local hardware contributes to Silverlight’s media experience.

Silverlight applications can now access webcams with client-side input access. Transformation encoding happens on the client-side. Guthrie demonstrated an application that morphed his picture, and he uploaded it to his Twitter profile.

Another application scanned a barcode and invoked a Web service to compare product prices at online retailers.

Microsoft has added smooth streaming for video playback. The bitrate is automatically adjusted as processor and network conditions change, Guthrie explained. He also previewed video streaming to an iPhone.

There’s also an assortment of new controls and capabilities for business users. Silverlight applications can now print, as well as read from the clipboard; the platform now supports drag-and-drop and accepts mouse-wheel input.

Another highlight was an embedded HTML hosting control. Guthrie demonstrated Flash video being played within a Silverlight application.

At the lower level, Silverlight 4 includes UDP multicast for peer-to-peer scenarios, REST enhancements via ADO.NET data services, and Windows Communication Foundation RIA services that enables access to data for queries, changes and custom operations.

Microsoft also tweaked Silverlight’s performance by added JIT optimizations in the Common Language Runtime compiler for Silverlight, Guthrie said. “It’s almost twice as fast for processor-intensive things.”

Assemblies are shared between Silverlight 4 and .NET 4, and Microsoft will ship a WYSIWYG design surface with Visual Studio 2010. Microsoft is also adding code completion for data binding expressions.

Beta 1 of Silverlight 4 is available for download. A new plug-in has been developed for Google's Chrome browser. Silverlight 4 should be finished in the first half of 2010, Guthrie said.

Internet Explorer 9 was also previewed at PDC. Microsoft is focusing on improving standards support, graphics and JavaScript performance, Guthrie said. CSS 3 and HTML 5 are standards that Microsoft will be incorporating into the browser.

In an effort to distinguish the IE user experience, IE 9’s rendering engine provides hardware-accelerated GDI drawing that is made possible through DirectX APIs. “Hardware shines through on the browser even with standards-based rendering,” Guthrie said.

No timetable was given for its release.


Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, Silverlight


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