Silverlight 4 Information

This latest version of Silverlight delivers hundreds of features and controls that, when combined with the continued innovation in Microsoft’s world-class tools for designers and developers — Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend – present the leading edge in rapid, powerful application development. With printing support, rich reporting and charting, and integration with back-end systems and server products including Microsoft SharePoint, Silverlight is ready for business.

Getting Started with Silverlight 4 | READ ME: What’s New in Silverlight 4?

Getting Started with Silverlight 4

First, visit the Get Started page to get the bits and see our recommendations on how to best get started with Silverlight. Then come back here to see the additional learning material we’ve created to help you be productive with Silverlight.

• Videos
  This is a series of videos covering the top Silverlight 4 features in more detail with available source sample code in C# and Visual Basic.
• Guides and labs
  Explore Silverlight 4 using these hands-on labs.
• Read the "What’s New" Whitepaper By John Papa
• Silverlight Blogs
  Keep up to date on more videos/materials by subscribing to the blogs of Tim Heuer, Jesse Liberty, Pete Brown, John Papa and Adam Kinney who will be providing more updates to Silverlight 4. You may also want to subscribe to the Silverlight community blogs for updates from our MVP community.
• Subscribe to Silverlight TV
  Go behind the scenes at Microsoft with John Papa and learn what the Silverlight product team is dreaming up next. See exclusive interviews with the Silverlight product team, watch how community leaders are using Silverlight to solve real problems, and keep up with the latest happenings with Silverlight. Catch the inside scoop on Silverlight!
• Help From the Forums
  The forums are available during your evaluation through on the Silverlight community site. We have established forums for assistance with Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services. Please use these forums only for Silverlight 4 or WCF RIA Services questions you may have and provide as much detail as you can for assistance.

We’re excited about this Silverlight 4 release and hope that you can get started right away with the new features developing great Silverlight applications!

What’s New in Silverlight 4?

Silverlight 4 delivers a full suite of powerful capabilities to business application developers, bringing the best-of-breed .NET platform to browser-based experiences. Silverlight provides an ideal platform for developing and deploying modern business applications for both customer facing and staff-facing applications.

Business Application Development

Silverlight 4 consolidates its position as the natural choice for building business applications on the Web:

New Features for Application Developers

• Comprehensive printing support enabling hardcopy reports and documents as well as a virtual print view, independent of screen content.
• A full set of forms controls with over 60 customizable, styleable components. New controls include RichTextbox with hyperlinks, images, in-line controls, and editing. Enhanced controls include DataGrid with sortable/resizeable columns and copy/paste rows.
• WCF RIA Services introduces enterprise class networking and data access for building n-tier applications including transactions, paging of data, WCF and HTTP enhancements.
• Localization enhancements with Bi-Directional text, Right-to-Left support and complex scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and 31 new languages including Vietnamese and Indic support.
• The .NET Common Runtime (CLR) now enables the same compiled code to be run on the desktop and Silverlight without change.
• Enhanced databinding support increases flexibility and productivity through data grouping/editing and string formatting within bindings.
• Managed Extensibility Framework supports building large composite applications.
• Exclusive tooling support for Silverlight, new in Visual Studio 2010. Including a full editable design surface, drag & drop data-binding, automatically bound controls, datasource selection, integration with Expression Blend styling resources, Silverlight project support and full IntelliSense.

Developer tools

• Fully editable design surface for drawing out controls and layouts.
• Rich property grid and new editors for values
• Drag and drop support for databinding and automatically creating bound controls such as listbox, datagrid. New datasources window and picker.
• Easy to pick styles and resources to make a good looking application based on designer resources built in Expression Blend.
• Built in project support for Silverlight applications
• Editor with full intellisense for XAML and C# and VB languages.

Empowering richer, more interactive experiences

Silverlight is already in use as a comprehensive platform for building rich experiences both for application and pure media scenarios including HD quality, interactive video through Smooth Streaming. Silverlight 4 introduces additional capabilities to enable creation of ever more rich, appealing high-performance interactive experiences and innovative media experiences:

• Fluid interface enhancements advance application usability through animation effects.
• Webcam and microphone to allow capture of audio and video on the client.
• Bring data in to your application with features such as copy and paste or drag and drop.
• Long lists can now be scrolled effortlessly with the mouse wheel.
• Support conventional desktop interaction models through new features such as right-click context menu.
• Support for Google’s Chrome browser.
• Performance optimizations mean Silverlight 4 applications start quicker and run 200% faster than the equivalent Silverlight 3 application.
• Multi-touch support enables a range of gestures and touch interactions to be integrated into user experiences.
• Multicast networking, enabling Enterprises to lower the cost of streaming broadcast events such as company meetings and training, interoperating seamlessly with existing Windows Media Server streaming infrastructure.
• Content protection for H.264 media through Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady.
• Output protection for audio/video streams allowing content owners or distributors to ensure protected content is only viewed through a secure video connection.

Move beyond the browser

Silverlight 3 pioneered the delivery of a new class of Rich Internet Applications to work on the desktop without additional code or runtimes. Silverlight 4 extends this capability:

For Sandboxed applications

• Place HTML within your application enabling much tighter integration with content from web servers such as email, help and reports.
• Provide support for ‘toast’ notification windows, allowing applications to communicate status or change information while the user is working on another application through a popup window on the taskbar.
• Offline DRM, extending the existing Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady technology to work offline. Protected content can be delivered with a persistent license so that users can go offline immediately and start enjoying their content.
• Control over aspects of UI include window settings such as start position, size and chrome.

For Trusted applications

• Read and write files to the user’s MyDocuments, MyMusic, MyPictures and MyVideos folder (or equivalent for non-windows platforms) for example storage of media files and taking local copies of reports.
• Run other desktop programs such as Office, for example requesting Outlook to send an email, send a report to Word or data to Excel.
• COM automation enables access to devices and other system capabilities by calling into application components; for instance to access a USB security card reader.
• A new user interface for requesting application privileges access outside the standard Silverlight sandbox.
• Group policy objects allow organizations to tailor which applications may have elevated trust.
• Full keyboard support in fullscreen mode richer kiosk and media applications.
• Enhancements to networking allow cross-domain access without a security policy file.
• Custom Window ‘chrome’ to provide a highly branded experience

To learn more about these features, visit the MIX10 site to view sessions from the conference!