Silverlight 4 Beta was announced during the Wednesday keynote of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference PDC 2009. The Silverlight product team has worked very hard to add several features, as you can see from the list below. There is a ton of information available where you can find out more about Silverlight 4 Beta including:
- What’s New in Silverlight 4 Video
- Great place to start!
- A short video with me and Adam Kinney reviewing our favorite features
- Silverlight 4 Beta Technical Whitepaper
- Listing of all of the features, what they do, and sample code
- Silverlight 4 Training Course in Channel 9’s Learning Center
- hands on labs using the new features
- The Silverlight.net community site
- Several screen casts walking through the new features
Silverlight 4 Beta enhances the building of business applications, media applications, and applications that reach beyond the browser. Here is a quick list of all of the new features. For more details, please visit the Silverlight 4 Beta Whitepaper which contains a lot more detail for each feature.
- Enabling Business Application Development
- Printing
- Rich Text Area Control
- Rich Text Area with FlowDirection of RightToLeft
- Text Input
- WCF RIA Services
- Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
- Viewbox Control
- Auto-Sizing Columns and Copy from DataGrid
- Navigation Page Loading Extensibility
- Command Property on ButtonBase and Hyperlink
- SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath on the Selector
- Support for Referer Header
- UDP Multicast Client Support
- Single Source Multicast (one-to-many)
- Authentication Support with ClientHttpWebRequest
- IDataErrorInfo
- INotifyDataErrorInfo
- Grouping on CollectionViewSource
- Editable CollectionView IEditableCollectionView
- Binding to String Indexers
- StringFormat, TargetNullValue, FallbackValue
- Databinding Support for Dependency Objects
- ObservableCollection<T> Constructor Accepts IList and IEnumerable
- Empowering Richer Experiences
- Fluid UI States for ItemsControl
- Word Based Text Trimming (trailing ellipses)
- Implicit Styles
- MouseWheel Support
- Right Mouse Click
- Programmatic Clipboard Access
- Silverlight as a Drop Target
- Webcam and Microphone Support
- CompositeTransform
- Support for all PNG Formats
- Offline Digital Rights Management
- MP4 Playback Protected DRM
- WMS Multicast
- Output Protection
- Moving Beyond the Browser – Sandboxed Applications
- Out-of-Browser Windowing Updates
- WebBrowser Control
- HtmlBrush
- Notifications (Toast)
- Moving Beyond the Browser – Trusted Applications
- Native Integration
- File System Access
- Cross-Domain Networking Access
- Full File Path on Open and Save Dialogs
- Full Keyboard in Full Screen Mode
Just to give you a teaser, here is a glimpse of the new RichTextArea control that you may have seen during Scott Guthrie’s keynote!
