What is Microsoft Silverlight? - What’s New in Silverlight 3 Beta?
(Page 3 of 4 )
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.
Next: More New Silverlight 3 Features >>
More Silverlight Articles
More By Joe Eitel
/ 5 
