Dec 062010
Summary of the new features of Silverlight 5:
Premium Media Experiences
- Hardware video decode: GPU accelerated video decode
- Trickplay: automatic audio pitch correction
- Improved power awareness: prevent screensavers from kicking
- Remote-control support: control media playback with remote control devices (Silverlight TV?)
Application Development
- Databinding and MVVM
- Debug data-binding expressions, set breakpoints on bindings, and more easily determine errors
- Implicit DataTemplates allow templates to be created across an application to support a particular type by default.
- Ancestor RelativeSource bindings for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control
- Binding in style setters allows bindings to be used within styles to reference other properties
- New DataContextChanged event to make handling changes easier
- Markup extensions are now supported and allows code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers, enabling cutting-edge MVVM support
- WCF and RIA Services
- WS-Trust support
- WCF RIA Services improvements include complex type support, better MVVM support, and improved customization of code generation
- Networking stack supports low-latency network scenarios enabling more responsive application scenarios.
- Text and Printing
- Improved text clarity that enables crisper and cleaner text rendering, multi-column text flow and linked text containers, character and leading support, and full OpenType font support
- New Postscript Vector Printing API that provides programmatic control over what you print, and enables printing richer reports and documents
- Pivot functionality which enables developers to build amazing information visualization experiences
- Graphics
- Immediate mode graphics support enables accelerated 3-D graphics support
- Enables richer data visualization scenarios
- Out of Browser
- OOB can now create and manage child windows
- Trusted out of browser applications can use P/Invoke capabilities to call unmanaged libraries and Win32 APIs
- Enhanced group policy support enables enterprises to both lock down and open up security sandbox capabilities
- Testing Tools
- Automated UI testing support
- Performance
- Faster application startup, and provides 64-bit browser support
- Integrates with the Hardware Acceleration capabilities of IE9, and enables hardware acceleration in window-less mode
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