Silverlight 3.0 RTW

As you might already know Silverlight 3 RTW is out and with it the great power of Silverlight 3 was unleashed.

The main features made available are:

  • Tools
    • Expression Blend 3 RC
      • Ability to Import Photoshop and Illustrator
      • SketchFlow
      • State Management
    • Visual Studio 2010
      • Still in Beta 1 version but with a strong design tools for Silverlight
  • Controls
    • DataForm
      • Simple control that enabled a flexible way to display data of a single entity definition. Support several methods such as Display, Edit and Update and navigating to data.
    • DataPager
      • This control gives Paging support such as Next/Previous and Numeric paging on elements that implement the IPageViewCollection interface.
    • Navigation Framework
      • A Framework that will provide an easy way to provide navigation to applications, and that introduces to Silverlight 2 new controls, called Frame and Page. With it we can partition views into separate XAML files and navigate to each view independently. Also integrates with Browser history providing Browser Back and Forward functions.
      • SEO – Search Engine Optimization
      • Deep Linking
        • Possibility to navigate directly to a specific page in the Silverlight solution
    • New toolkit controls
  • Media
    • Support for H.264 and AAC encoding
    • Raw audio/video pipeline support that will provide audio/video decoding outside the runtime and render in Silverlight
  • Graphics
    • Perspective 3D
      • Support for 3D scenarios and putting object on a plane for various user experience scenarios.
    • Pixel Effects
      • Support for Pixel Shader Effects
    • Animation Easing
      • Provides a set of possibilities that will interpolate the animations and provide smoother animation transitions and other visual effects
    • Bitmap API
    • GPU Acceleration
    • Text/Image Improvements
  • Element-to-Element Binding
  • Local Connection API
    • Enable scenarios in order to Silverlight solutions to communicate with each other through an asynchronous messaging system. A pub-sub implementation for Silverlight applications.
  • Binding Validation API
  • SaveFileDialog
  • Dynamic Styling and Based On
    • Support for DynamicResource
    • Support for Based On Styles
  • Caret Brush
  • Merged Resource Dictionaries
  • Assembly Caching
    • Possibility of having the Silverlight solutions load core runtime from a runtime cache rather than having it on the xap file.
  • Network monitoring API
    • Possibility to check network status changes.
  • Out-of-Browser and Offline
    • Possibility to have the applications run on and off the browser and Offline also, having it work like a desktop solution.
  • Binary XML
    • Ability to communicate using WCF with Binary XML data format and providing smaller communications,
  • Web Service Utility
    • Slsvcutil.exe that works like the regular WCF svcutil tool but specific for Silverlight
  • .NET RIA Services (Still in CTP version)
    • A complete framework that will provide an easy way to develop using the n-tier pattern using the power of ASP.NET to help Silverlight to achieve this.

Know more on the Get Started session of Silverlight.net site.

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