What's new in Silverlight 2 Beta 2?

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Silverlight 2 Beta 2 includes a number of incremental improvements based on customer feedback.   Changes include improvements to controls, templating, Deep Zoom, performance, further compatibility with WPF, and much more.  For a full list of changes, see below:

Note: If you want to see a list of breaking changes between Beta 1 and Beta 2 go here.

· Animation
1. Support for animating custom data points
2. Object Animation support (animating structs)

· DeepZoom
1. New file format completely XML based. Also, there will be a new Deep Zoom Composer tool that will allow you to create these new file types.
2. MultiScaleTileSource  (implement a tile source to existing tile databases)
3. Better notifications when sub-images enter the view

· Controls
1. New TabControl
2. DataGrid improvements: Autosize, Reorder, Sort, Performance increase, and more
3. Calendar now supports multi-selection and blackout dates
4. Improved Templating Model: Visual State Manager
5. Control properties changes (Background, Tooltip, FontFamily, FontSize…)
6. Including controls in the runtime instead of having them packaged in app package

· TextBox
1. IME Level 3 input support on Windows and Level 1 on Mac
2. Text wrapping and multiline selection highlighting in textbox
3. Scrollbar Support
4. Document Level Navigation keys

· Improvements in error handling, reporting

· Property System/Parser
1. DependencyProperty.Register/RegisterAttached now supports PropertyMetadata
2. DependencyObject.ClearValue
3. Visual Tree Helper

· Data Binding
1. Per-binding level validation
2. Support for element syntax for binding markup extension
3. Binding to Attached Properties
4. ItemsControl Extensibility (OnItemsChanged method)
5. Fallback in Value Conversion (Binding.UnsetValue)

· Input
1. Limited keyboard support in FullScreen mode (arrow, tab, enter, home, end, pageup/pagedown, space)
2. Managed APIs for Inking

· Networking and Data
1. Cross Domain support in Sockets
2. Cross Domain security enhancements
3. BrowserHttpWebRequest and WebClient callable from BackGround Threads
4. Upload support for WebClient
5. UI for isolated storage (ability to change quota)
6. Duplex communications (“push” from Server to Silverlight client)
7. LINQ-to-JSON
8. Configuration support for web service proxies
9. Significantly improved SOAP interop
10. “Add New Item” template in Visual Studio for “Silverlight-enabled WCF Service”
11. ADO.NET Data Services support

· UIAutomation and Accessibility support in platform

· Media
1. Platform support for Adaptive streaming
2. Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady
3. Basic SSPL support

· Localization
1. Changes in application model for multilingual apps (one xap per supported locale)
2. Expanded localization languages of runtime and SDK
3. Japanese SDK Installer and documentation (July 17)

· Several changes for WPF compatibility

· Remote Debugging for VB on Mac

· CLR
1. Developer Runtime Package facilitate development (localized strings, debugging binaries, etc)
2. Support the OS fallback logic for resources
3. CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture Isolation

· DLR
1. Performance improvements
2. Various new DLR and IronPython 2.0 Beta 2 language features
3. Various new IronRuby Features

 

David Pugmire
Product Manager - Silverlight