Silverlight 5 Feature Announcements During Live Firestarter Event

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The following features have just been announced live by Scott Guthrie during the Silverlight Firestarter event.

Media features

  • Video hardware decode – better performance; better on low-power-cpu devices that have a GPU
  • Trickplay – watch video at faster speed while preserving pitch
  • Power management – hold-off screensaver when full screen (until paused)
  • Remote control – for 10ft experience

Also, IIS Media Service 4 was recently shipped (and is free) – live and on-demand smooth streaming to desktop, Windows Phone 7 and iPhone (via live trans-muxing) – enhancements to Expression Media Encoder to support on-demand/live streaming to devices – also now announced is support on Windows Azure

New application features

  • Data binding – breakpoints and inspection in XAML bindings (!!); custom markup extensions (from WPF, great for MVVM); implicit DataTemplates; Ancestor RelativeSource (from WPF); binding and style setters (great for dynamic theme changes); DataContextChanged event
  • Inter-layout Transitions for list change animations
  • Networking – WS-Trust support; low-latency networking; MVVM-friendly data source, end-to-end support for complex types, Windows Azure support
  • Text – clarity; multi-column text; character tracking and leading; full OpenType support; vector PostScript printing.
  • Pivot add-on for SL4 will be part of SL5 – dynamic pivot is awesome
  • 3D Graphics (!!!!) – Immediate-mode graphics API; fluid layout transitions; hardware 3D acceleration of models & textures
  • model
  • more layers
  • Multiple Windows Support – with child windows
  • P/Invoke – can now call Win32 APIs
  • Enterprise Group Policy Support – get full trust out-of-browser features, but in the browser
  • Automated UI Testing – record UI, generate code, re-test – awesome!
  • Improved Profiling – memory, CPU, thread connection
  • Improved startup time
  • Hardware acceleration in IE 9
  • 64-bit version

Release Schedule!!!

Silverlight 5 Beta – Spring 2011

Release – by end of 2011

Get more details from Microsoft:

Scott Guthrie’s blog – http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/12/02/announcing-silverlight-5.aspx

Tim Heuer’s blog – http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/12/02/silverlight-5-revealed-at-firestarter.aspx

As a Microsoft MVP for Silverlight, I’m delighted to see the future of Silverlight 5 unfolding quite nicely (and stunningly in the case of 3D hardware acceleration) as well as an emphasis on what great applications can be built today with the existing Silverlight 4 technologies.

Note that there are no preview/beta bits available to download at this time.

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