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As quickly as things move in the digital age, a 2008 program can seem as outdated as one created in 1999. Microsoft makes improvements quickly though, and as recently as March 18th of this year they released the beta of Silverlight 3.0. Unlike its predecessor, it is compatible with multiple web browser products used on Microsoft WindowsandMac OS X operation systems. So, why is Silverlight such an important development? Let’s find out.
Silverlight Then and Now
Essentially, Silverlight 1.0, which was created over a year ago, was intended to be Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash and Flex and several other rich Internet application and AJAX frameworks. Originally, the program manipulated its multimedia-savvy, Windows Presentation Foundation user interface using JavaScript. Silverlight 1.1, which added support for compiled .Net languages and supported more of the .Net API, was only available as an alpha test at the time.
Silverlight 1.1 was such an important upgrade for Microsoft that it was eventually renumbered Silverlight 2. Silverlight 2 supported all .Net languages, including the dynamic languages such as IronPython and IronRuby, and it contained a good portion of the .Net base classes, including new features such as LINQ (language-integrated query). In addition to its rich set of controls, it had APIs for an alphabet soup of networking, including REST, SOAP, RSS, and HTTP. It also included local data caching and storage and supported HD video, among other rich media formats. H.264 video and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) audio support was even being planned for Silverlight 3.0, which is now available.
Silverlight 2’s crowning moment was the Beijing Olympics in August of 2008; the program was favorably reviewed and generally well received. There were some who complained of incompatible hardware and operating systems, but nothing too bad or unexpected. There was no denying Silverlight’s Internet video streaming of the Olympics, provided by NBC in the U.S., China Central Television in China and broadcasters in 10 other major national markets, was a huge success for Microsoft. Shortly after the Olympics, Silverlight 2 also enabled Blockbuster to offer high-quality streaming video to PC and Mac users for its MovieLink service.
Silverlight 3.0 will certainly prove to be just as successful. Aside from being the most comprehensive offering for the rapid creation and delivery of sophisticated applications through a Web browser, it is also forged from technology used in over 100,000 companies and understood by over four million developers worldwide. Silverlight has the full support of Microsoft's tools, technologies, and a thriving partner ecosystem.
Silverlight 3’s Beta preview release, which continues Silverlight’s track record of rapid innovation, introduced more than 50 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications out of the browser, dramatic video performance and quality improvements, and features that radically improve developer productivity. Combined with the continued innovation in Visual Studio and Expression Blend, Silverlight 3 empowers .NET developers to create cutting-edge Rich Internet Applications and media experiences.
What’s New in Silverlight 3 Beta?
For those who used and became familiar with Silverlight 2, it may be hard to see how any improvements could have been made to such a well-equipped and easy-to-utilize program. Microsoft has gone out of its way to make a great number of improvements. Aside from being fully supported by Visual Studio and Expression Blend, highlights of new features and functionality of Silverlight 3 include major media enhancements, out-of-browser support allowing Web applications to work on the desktop, significant graphics improvements including 3D graphics support, GPU acceleration and H.264 video support and countless features to improve RIA development productivity. Also, in order to fully integrate all of the .NET developer tools, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express will support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight.
As mentioned previously, Silverlight 3 also provides an increased number of controls including, but not limited to, DataGrid, TreeView, various layout panels, DataForm for forms-driven applications and DataPager for viewing paginated data. Some of these controls come from the Silverlight Toolkit. Also included is a much-hoped for and applauded navigation framework that enables Silverlight applications to use the hyperlinked navigation model, and to allow deep-linking -- meaning linking directly to specific pages -- within Silverlight applications.
Microsoft has also made great strides to ensure that Silverlight is even more dedicated to providing an amazing visual and audio experience. On the media front, Silverlight 3 supports AAC audio decoding as well as hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding. The native multimedia pipeline is programmatically exposed, which means other formats can be supported by third parties using managed code decoders.
It’s clear that Microsoft has developed a multitude of ultra-cool features. One of Silverlight 3’s most impressive enables 3D transformations of 2D elements. These transformations, as well as other 2D operations such as stretches and alpha bending, are hardware-accelerated. Custom animations, including transforms and blends, can be created using Silverlight elements such as HLSL to make use of pixel shaders. Also included is a Bitmap API, which enables Silverlight 3 applications to manipulate bitmaps.
Also, Silverlight now uses the GPU to accelerate the composition of Visual Trees. Like WPF, Silverlight elements correspond to Visual elements, and when coupled with the layout information, form a “composition tree” or Visual Tree which then forms the final display. Conveniently, Visual Trees can now be cached, which will greatly increase performance when it comes to things like transforms, which usually creates way too many throw-away intermediate states because the state transitions are not made on the main Visual tree.
Elements in Silverlight 3 also now support element-to-element binding, which allows one element to be bound to the state of another element, as well as a validation mechanism for data binding. Unlike Silverlight 2, which allowed the applications to save files only to the local iso storage, Silverlight 3 applications can save to any location on the file system through the system Save File dialog.
Despite that improvement, it should be pointed out that the path where the file is saved will still be hidden from the Silverlight application. Also, any external assemblies used by Silverlight applications are cached too, so that they do not need to be downloaded again for subsequent uses of the application.
Silverlight 3 also includes a Local Connection API to communicate among multiple running applications on the same machine, no matter what network or browser is currently being used for network connectivity events. Microsoft’s new program also has the option of being able to use Binary XML to communicate with WCF services.
Microsoft’s very long laundry list of new Silverlight features isn’t quite done with yet. Silverlight 3 also supports Out-of-Browser experiences. This means that Silverlight applications can be installed on a system for offline access, provided the application manifest is designed to allow local installation outside the browser. In order to install applications offline, they must be launched using the Start Menu or desktop shortcuts and run without the browser window. These applications can check whether they are running inside a browser or not, and when running out of browser, HTML interop is disabled. Access to the Function Keys is also now enabled, but locally installed Silverlight applications still run in a sandbox. Lastly, installed Silverlight 3 applications automatically check for updates at every launchandupdates are automatically installed. Running instances of the applications are informed when updates are available.
It could be said that Silverlight is essentially nothing more than Microsoft's vision of a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in designed to be the source of rich online user experiences. It’s no surprise that Microsoft’s other intention may have been to dislodge Flash from its current dominant position on the market, and when the Redmond company said “cross-platform,” they indeed meant it. Silverlight, it seems, is the future, and is designed to deliver the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.
Microsoft continues to present both new products and a new vision for how services and software will interoperate in the Microsoft and Silverlight ecosystems. Microsoft is providing not only the tools and software, but they are complementing it with new services from their Live division. Microsoft has also demonstrated today that their vision is for all browsers and all web users, not just users of Internet Explorer, which has been a common complaint. The new Silverlight, as previously mentioned, has been designed to perform with both Firefox and Safari, and also works with the Mac OSX platform. Basically, if you haven’t heard of Silverlight or haven’t used it, it’s time to get on board, because you’ll be seeing and hearing a lot more about it.