Dear all,

The offical release of Silverlight3 happened on 10th July 2009.     I had already conveyed about the new features that are introduced in Silverlight3 in my Presentation at Community Tech days Jun 2009 as well as in my previous post in this my blog.   Anyhow I'll just re-iterate the major features that are released as part of Silverlight3.

Out of Browser:

This enables the user to run the Silverlight applications offline(like WPF application).    The locally installed application can be invoked from Taskbar also in addition to the Desktop shortcut and StartMenu.  This feature is supported in Windows as well as in Macintosh.   It also equipped with Network detection support and auto update mechanism.

Graphical enhancements:

Now Silverlight3 leverages the GPU to enable richer and immersive graphical experiences.  SL3 provides new Bitmap and Pixel APIs, it also allows the user to created Pixel shader effects like BlurEffect, DropShadow effect.

Productivity improvements:

Now the SL3 toolkit contains 100+ controls with styling and template customization support.   It also provides lot of enhancements in data binding such as Hierarchical Data binding, Element to Element binding, Validation error template, DataForm control with Master/Detail view support etc.,

Media enhancments:

SL3 delivers an excellent performance on Graphics and Video rendering by utilizing GPU instead of CPU.   This enables the SL3 to render HD videos with superior quality and performance.  Silverlight 3 includes new media codec support for H.264 video, AAC audio and MPEG-4 content.   With the support for raw bitstream for Audio/Video, SL3 can now support any non-native formats.   The HD support in SL3 combined with smooth streaming support IIS media services(free server product), can now deliver a better and efficient video experience over the web.

VS2008 tools for SL3:
There is a free download available for VS2008 to support SL3 development.  It has support for Intellisense, Compilation, SL3 app debugging and much more. 

Expression Blend3:
Along with this SL3 release, a Release Candidate of Expression Blend 3 is also published.  This comes with lot of new features like Sketchflow, Intellisense, Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator Import, Sample Test data, TFS integration, Behaviours etc.,  The final release of Expression Blend 3 is targetted for next month.

To download Silverlight3 Browser plugin, SDK and tools, do visit "www.silverlight.net"

Happy programming.

Cheers,

Saran