The New Enhancements in Silverlight 5

Finally on 2nd December 2010, Microsoft came forward with an announcement of Silverlight 5 which was earlier termed as Future of Silverlight within the Silverlight Fire Starter Event by Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice Precident of Microsoft. From the words of Scott Guthrie, it is realized that the new version silver light 5 Beta will be made available in the earlier months of 2011. It is expected full fledges on the third quarter of 2011. Silverlight 5 comes with more than 40 new features such as support for running Silverlight applications within the browser with desktop features, impressive video quality with improved performance, and adds on features to improve developer productivity.
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Some of the Key Features discussed below:

Silverlight 5 : Improved Media Enhancements

Silverlight is well known for its streaming media applications. New Features supports to media streaming are:
# Hardware decode and Presentation of H.264to improve the performance for low power devices to produce high definition videos with the help of GPU support.
# Trick Play, a new technology allows you to play videos in different speeds and also supports fast forward and rewind facilities. This Trickplay technology comes with audio enhancements like Audio Pitch Correction upto twice the video speed. This feature allows users to watch videos while preserving the right audio pitch.
#Digital rights Management Advancements that allows the seamless switching between DRM media sources.
#Remote-control support is another enhanced feature allows users for controlling media playback.
#Improved power awareness that allows the system to sleep mode when video is not active.

Silverlight 5 : Graphic Improvements

Silverlight 5 comes with 3D applications which were not including in silverlight 4. Silverlight 4 provides only a half baked prespective 3D as compared with silverlight 5. The new improved features supports Graphics in Silverlight 5 are:
#Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerated 3-D application programming interface (API) that provides rich graphics for developing advanced data visualizations and enhanced User interfaces.
#Immediate mode graphics Application Programming Interface that allows direct rendering to the GPU.
#Enabled Hardware acceleration in windowless mode with Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9).

Silverlight 5: Out-of-browser trusted applications

Silverlight also brings new trusted application features with desktop capabilities for the first time to browser. Silverlight in the Out of Browser mode users allows to perform complex tasks within the same platform. These feature enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate.

# It allows to host HTML content as a web Browser control within this silverlight application. HTML contents like help content or email can also be integrated within this application.
#Read and write files to User's "My Documents" Folder sothat user can easily find media files or make local copies or reports.
# User can access devices and other system capabilities by calling an application called COM components. Users are also allowed to acca USB security card reader or a bar code scanner.
#User can launch Microsoft office and other desktop applications within this Silverlight application.Users can also open Microsoft outlook and create a mail or send a report to Microsoft Word.
#Full Keyboard support in full screen enables richer Kiosk and media applications.
#Child Window support that allow for launching multiple windows from the application.
# Call existing unmanaged code directly from within Silverlight with PInvoke.

Silverlight 5 : Performance improvements

#XAML parser improvements speed up the startup and runtime performances.
#Supports 64-bit operating system .

Silverlight 5 : Tools improvements

The New expected features comes under Tools improvements are :
# Visual Studio Team Test support.
# Visual Studio profile support including CPU, memory, thread contention etc.

Silverlight 5 : Business Applications

#Fluid User Interface (UI) enabled for smoother animations within the user interface.
#Inter-Layout Transitions that allow developers to specify animations to apply when elements are added, removed, re-ordered etc, within a particular layout.

Silverlight 5: Networking and Windows Communication Foundation enhancements

# A background thread for networking allows to reduce network latency.
# WS-Trust support: Security Assertion Markup Language authentication token.

Silverlight 5 : Text improvements

#Tracking or leading set precisely how far apart each character is for full creative control.
#OpenType support
#Improved Text Clarity with pixel snapping
#Improved Text layout performance
# Multicolumn text and linked text container that allow text to flow around other elements.

Major Other Features of Silverlight 5

Postscript vector printing that allows users to create reports and documents, including the ability to create a virtual print view which is different from what exactly shown on the screen.
Model View ViewModel (MVVM) and Databinding enhancements enables to do more work easily via XAML
Debugging supportenables breakpoints to be set on a binding, so users can step through binding failures.
Implicit DataTemplatesthat allow to create templates across an application to support a particular type by default.
The DataContextChanged eventis introduced.
Silverlight 5 beta will be made available in the second half of the year 2011. Let us wait for silverlight beta 5.