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First showing of Silverlight 4 for developers at PDC


By David Worthington


 David Worthington
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November 18, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
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.


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