Further, independent animation classes have been ported from Windows Phone 7 - along with immediate graphics mode from WPF - to speed up graphics rendering.Īnother good addition is support for H.264-encoded media playback, which now pushes processing overhead to GPU-accelerated hardware. XNA sound effect classes can be used to create independent sound instances - improving audio precision for effect timing and looping, for example. The Silverlight 5 beta also shows off a number of performance tweaks and multimedia enhancements that will be important for game developers. New text flow capabilities in Silverlight 5 help streamline multiple-column layouts. With vector-based printing and OpenType support in the offing, better report and doc creation apps can't be far behind. In addition to enriched kerning and leading for tighter text control, Silverlight's new multicolumn text flow controls do a nice job at building snazzier page layouts. On the interface front, Silverlight 5 makes good strides at improving text handling. Dynamic data templates are a welcome alternative to cranking out custom converters, and they go a long way toward simplifying your code. Silverlight 5: Presentation, sound, and video Microsoft has also included implicit data templates that provide more flexibility in the presentation of disparate data sets. This makes it easier to configure properties or change the default language, for example, without messing around with resource wrappers. New markup extensions let you run custom code within bindings. The evaluated settings offer more flexible tuning of interface control display properties at runtime. I liked the new access for augmenting styles via bindings. You can now trace and bind the data context of a parent element without duplicating properties across multiple child views, streamlining both process and code. I was able to bind to ancestors in the visual tree (similar to WPF's FindAncestor), which takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of DataTemplate design. Now, you can spot data binding errors easily without sifting through generic output messages.ĭata binding has also been enhanced with several features found in WPF. The Silverlight 5 beta lifts XAML with new debugging capabilities. You can now use the Locals window for easy drill-down into errors and even be warned of potential pitfalls of improper placement within the debugger. Gone is the tedium of having to sift through error messages or wire custom converters to trace binding errors. Debugging is now extended to XAML through breakpoints and runtime value inspection. Instead of Visual Studio, you could use Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1 as the development platform.įirst off, it was good to see that Silverlight 5 can reference earlier version assemblies, as well as upgrade old projects with ease. The Beta included the Developer Runtime, SDK, and a new preview of WCF RIA Service v1 SP2. I installed the Silverlight 5 Tools Beta to Visual Studio 2010 SP 1. Stepping in from the big picture, there are a number of improvements to Silverlight's runtime and development tools that shouldn't be ignored. Silverlight 5: Improved tools I appreciate that Silverlight 5 is prerelease, and perhaps I shouldn't be looking at it so critically. Microsoft has said that the next version of the Windows Phone OS (aka Mango) will sport the Silverlight 4 runtime, and that there will be no support for running Silverlight applications in the Windows Phone browser. Plus, it undoubtedly makes good fiscal sense for Microsoft to consolidate internally with Windows 8 and a new version of Windows Phone on the horizon. After all, Silverlight was originally code-named WPF/Everywhere. This blurring of these lines shouldn't come as a total shock. Rather than extending Silverlight to continue hammering away at Adobe Flash, Microsoft seems to be working toward a desktop smackdown with itself - adding Windows-specific platform invocation calls, Component Object Model (COM) support, and untethered file system access that push Silverlight deeper into the domains of. In short, the Silverlight 5 beta looks more like a dot revision with feature creep than a major upgrade. Even the included code previews for satellite projects - such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) RIA Services and Expression Blend - do little more than gussy up existing capabilities. Instead, I was disappointed to find that many promised Silverlight 5 features are still missing or meager. More than a year has gone by without a major Silverlight release, and with none due until late 2011, I expected the forthcoming version 5 to be a major rev that would cement Silverlight's superiority over Adobe Flash.
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