Silverlight 5; going to be HOT HOT HOT

  • Article

Silverlight Firestarter took place yesterday (last night) in Seattle. You can still watch online on demand, but here’s the highlights;

The family is growing: Big daddy WPF, Slinky Silverlight and HTML5 Jnr are now all part of the future vision.

Great media enhancements:

  1. Adding hardware support so you can watch a 1080p stream live and OD on your Netbook, without it grinding to a halt
  2. New thing called Trickplay that adjusts variable speed for video and audio playback so you don’t get the chipmunk voice when you speed up
  3. Adding new power management features
  4. Remote control support – whoohoo!
  5. On the server side the new IIS Media Services 4 (released end Oct) now allows you to stream the same live H.264 for Silverlight players (PC, Mac, Linux, Nokia S60 phones, Windows Phone 7 and set-up-boxes) PLUS with a checkbox tick you can ad real time delivery to iPhone and iPad! More on Chris Knowlton’s blog here (roughly 14:22 in they keynote)
  6. And keeping with hot topics: adding Azure support for IIS Media Services

And on the app side: some serious enhancements around Data Binding;

  • Data Binding Debugging
  • Markup Extensions for MVVM
  • Implicit Data Templates
  • Ancestor RelativeSource Binding
  • Binding in Style Setters
  • DataContextChanged Event

WCF & RIA Services;

  • WS-Trust Support
  • Low-latency Networking
  • MVVM friendly DataSource
  • End-to-end Support for Complex Types
  • Windows Azure Support

Test & Perf Tools

  • Automated UI Testing
  • Improved Profiling Support ; Memory, CPU & Thread contention

All of this and more, Silverlight 5 Beta will launch Spring 2011 (SOON!)