Silverlight – a progressive journey

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Silverlight 4 beta release at the PDC09. The announcement took me by surprise as I upgraded my projects to Silverlight 3 a couple of months back and then MS announces the next version… huh?. Here’s the release story of Silverlight.

• Silverlight 1
  Released to Web (RTW) in September of 2007, initially called Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere (WPF/E), Silverlight enabled creation of rich UI applications hosted on a website which gets downloaded on to the client machine and ran in a sandbox environment. This release was mostly meant for playing media elements (video and audio files) and also included features for creating geometrical objects and associating them with storyboards to animate them. Although this sounds very primitive and naive, it gave quite a bit of flexibility to a developer’s creativity.

• Silverlight 2
  Silverlight 2, attained RTW in October of 2008, included the .net Framework’s CLR. This enabled developing Silverlight in any of the .net languages. The XAML and the code-behind got complied into a .xap file (basically a zip file). This created a ‘dhamaka’ (a Hindi word meaning ‘blast’) in the Silverlight world as it included features like extensible controls, xml based data access services (web services, rest, etc) and the ability to use LINQ API’s.

• Silverlight 3
  About 10 months after Silverlight 2, Microsoft RTW’ed Silverlight 3 (July of 2009). This version took application development in Silverlight to a whole new level. Grid controls, Navigation framework, Element-to-element binding and Out-of-browser experience were some of the highlights of this version. On the Media side, it enabled true HD playback in full screen.

• Silverlight 4
  It’s been about 5 months since Silvelright 3 and we news hear about Silverlight 4’s beta release with an RTW ETA of Q2 2010. More customizable controls including RichTextbox and Masked Textbox, printing support, read-write access to files in user profile (for trusted applications) are some of the things I liked about this version. See the complete listing here.

With 4 major releases in about 3 years, Silverlight is developing at an astonishing rate. GO Silverlight Team!!