March Craziness!
If you haven’t seen, there’s a ton of new downloads available from Microsoft. IE8 has finally been released!
There were also some nice announcements made at Mix09. Most anticipated was the Silverlight 3 features. Some of the highlights are below.
- Video & Audio enhancements (H.264 support!)
- Perspective 3D graphics
- Pixel Shader effects
- Dynamic Styles with Inheritance (cascading Styles)
- Element to Element binding
- Data Validation
- RIA Services support
- Out of Browser Capabilities
That’s an impressive list. If I were to pick some of my favorites, it would have to be improved Data Binding support and Out of Browser Capabilities. From day one when I heard the plans for Silverlight, all I could think of was how the browser was just this lame shell used to launch the application. I guess the folks at Microsoft were thinking the same thing. Plus, you don’t have to worry about back button support anymore.. ;)
I installed SL3 bits today, as well as IE8. I already experienced a crash in IE8, which is strange, and I’m not yet ready to blame IE but I’ll certainly have to do some more diagnostics. Haven’t had a chance to build with SL3 yet. My only complaint so far is that the install is SLOW. Actually the uninstall for SL2 Tools seemed to be really slow, the Install for SL3 tools was just slow. I’ll keep you posted!