Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4 in beta at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) today. Some of the new features include more fluid animations, Webcam, microphone and printing support, 200 percent faster start times than Silverlight 3, deep zoom and multi-touch support and more. It now also supports Google Chrome, even though it’s just a rounding error of a browser.
One of the big capabilities of Silverlight 4 is its ability to take rich-media experiences outside the browser in client apps which will compete with Adobe AIR. The non-browser apps fully support HTML, allowing tight integration with content from the Web. It also supports notifications.
During one demo, Microsoft showed what a Silverlight version of Facebook might look like. Using Facebook’s APIs, Microsoft created a demo app which was completely reskinned, complete with news feed, contacts, and photos. Cycling through photos in the Silverlight Facebook app, for instance, was much faster than doing it in the browser. Although I’m not sure we’re oing to start to see a whole bunch of Facebook desktop apps like we do with Twitter, but the it was a good demo.
Some screenshots below of what Facebook would look like as a Silverlight app. They show a reskinned stream view, a people view, Facebook photos, and a grid view.
Is it even possible to release new versions of this any faster? As a developer I barely have version 2 working…
I think Microsoft is finally realizing that WPF is, for the most part, dead on arrival. That makes Silverlight their best bet for hanging on to WinForm developers who are looking at web based apps for their next upgrade. If you look at the new 4.0 features a lot of them are to close the gap between what WPF could do on the Desktop.
The true beauty of Silverlight is that it’s one product that competes in both the web space and the Enterprise space which makes upgrading it as quickly as possible almost a no-brainer.
I partially agree on it. One of the big differentces between WPF and Silverlight 4 is the performance. In WPF, you can use some data structures such as SortedList. I found in Silverlight, you can only use Dictionary. But, anyway, I just did a LINQ query in Silverlight. It is much slower when operating on large collections. But Silverlight is typically a client-side technology for light weight applications. The compromise is acceptable anyway.
Another difference I can see is the security. Silverlight 4 doesn’t support the true full trust mode yet. But support on WCF TCP binding is really good for trading systems.
I’d love to get that, anyone know if it is availible anywhere?
http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/
It is right now for developers. Final version is expected in Q1 2010.
From what I’ve seen most of the new runtime features in Silverlight 4, Microsoft are still playing catching up with Adobe’s Flash Player, rather than any new innovations.
One of the few exceptions is in a “out-of-browser” Silverlight application rendering HTML content and using browser plugins, with a demo showing Flash Player YouTube video inside of the Silverlight application! There’s been other demos of loading in YouTube video streams into Silverlight, but this was apparently the Flash Player running inside of Silverlight.
One area that Microsoft has in the past really innovated was with video, with Adobe playing catch up, but there doesn’t seem to be any new video features beyond Microsoft extending their DRM. Meanwhile Adobe has managed to gain a lead in this area now with their new peer-to-peer video in Flash Player 10 and then more improvements in 10.1.
You might be talking from and end-user perspective. But from a developer view the gap is quite large.
Features in Silverlight like multi-language support (C#, F#, VB.NET) and powerful things like multi-threaded apps that help you make use of the multi-core processors leave Flash looking like a small toy.
Yeah, I was talking about from the user’s perspective but also just looking at new features in Silverlight 4, compared to what is available.
Rendering in Flash takes advantage of multi-core processors, but it’s true that ActionScript is single-threaded which can be quite limiting at times. Now you can separate threads in Flash with Pixel-Bender, but that’s mainly for number crunching and not for any ActionScript code.
they are really pushing silverlight. I love it! now only if I could get my enterprise clients to keep up with the release cycle…
What about the other announcements at PDC? The Dallas public data store is really cool, not to mention the new stuff with Azure. I know it’s not from Google or Apple, but for a site that’s so excited about web and cloud offerings, it’s curious to not see any coverage at all.
As an FYI, Adobe doesn’t have the lead in video. Major content producers won’t touch it because of DRM. Flash Media Server is 50x the cost of IIS with Smoothstream. Just to name a few point…
even my little sister can take better screenshots then these blury ones.. are you guys techie?
I believe the are photograph from PDC and not screenshot.
Wow, this is quite a surprise. I wasn’t expecting it so soon.
The nice thing about Silverlight for developers is that it is fully backward compatible, just like .NET.
So, you can progressively take advantage of them.
Silverlight is going to play a huge role in the “Web 3.0″ because of its amazing capabilities (from a developer point of view) and ease of integration (from a user point of view).
And I’m so glad it doesn’t have the baggage that Flash has: On my Firefox, Flash is disabled by default because I don’t want to load all the flash ads.
Disclaimer: I wrote “Silverlight 2 in Action” and have been working with Silverlight since Dec. 26, 2006.
At this point, I disagree that “Silverlight is playing catch up with Flash”. I think this was seen by the fact that MXML had to be drastically enhanced to catch up to Silverlight’s XAML. I think that the video story in Silverlight is far superior in terms of cost and video quality. I think that developers are more empowered considering Silverlight uses the .NET Framework and allows developers to choose the language they want to work with.
I could go on for quite sometime. The bottom line is: I do not think Silverlight is playing catch up. In addition, I really look forward to the apps that will be developed with Silverlight in the coming years. I think we will see some amazing applications on this amazing platform.
The developer side of things Silverlight is quite powerful, but from a end user’s perspective a lot of the new features are things that can be found in Flash.
Here’s a list of Silverlight 4 features, which to me seem to be just a catch up to what is available in Flash and Flex:
* Printing API
* Right-click event handling
* Webcam/microphone access
* Mouse wheel support
* RichTextArea Control
* Clipboard API
* Local file access
* Cross-domain Networking changes
* Keyboard access in full screen mode
* Text trimming
* Right-to-left, BiDi and complex script
* Offline DRM
* H.264 protected content
* Implicit theming
* Google Chrome support
Silverlight has everything in the one plugin, Flash needs AIR to deliver comparable features.
Also alot of the features in SL4 that matthew fab is saying is in flash/air only came out in flash/air recently in the beta, that is version 10.1 beta (10 versions). Where as silverlight did it all in 3 years (4 versions).
Also Silverlight excels at how it delivers enterprise apps and allows developers to build LOB apps. Flash has Flex BUT is far from what Silverlights RIA services and MEF (plus .NET 4) gives you.
Take the time to understand both technologies before you comment Matthew Fab and others..
How is the Silverlight out-of-browser experience equivalent to Adobe AIR? Adobe AIR has almost all of the permissions of a native app (eg. read/write local files, database functionality) whereas I understand it SL out-of-browser is still restricted to browser-level permissions. And of course AIR 2.0 is mor epowerful still, eg. can launch other native apps.
Also, are you saying the component set in SL is better than Flex? The Flex component set seems much more comprehensive to me:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/index.html
Disclaimer: I am a Silverlight MVP and the author of Silverlight 4 Unleashed.
In fact Silverlight 4 out of the browser can get elevated permissions (with user approval of course) that give additional rights to the application. With this additional feature (which was unveiled today), many of the AIR features are accessible to Silverlight out of the browser. Since today’s version is a beta, the exact amount of features that will be available to an application running with elevated permissions is not quite known yet, but there are some of these in the beta already.
Thanks,
Laurent
John Richards, the only feature I mentioned in my first post was peer-to-peer video, which Adobe first introduced in Flash 10.0. However, that was one Flash Player client sending video to another client without a server (aka web conferencing). The big thing in 10.1 that Adobe added was peer-to-peer networking, so when streaming live video events users are passing streaming data to each other instead of getting it all from the server. That I think is going to be a big game changer as that really changes the expense of having live events, as the bandwidth running the server will see big drops when not everyone needs to directly connect with the server.
Say no to silverlight!
say no to HTML 5
HTML 5 FTW!!!
HTML5 = rubbish
While I have not written a book I agree with Chad. As a developer who’s used both I don’t think Silverlight is playing catchup with Flash (okay maybe in the move from v1 to v2). Especially in how the two approach developing web applications.
maybe this should be more like version 2.7 or something and not leap a whole version number on every release
In the contrary,, it is refreshing to see Microsoft changing their usual way (see .NET 3,0, 3.5, 3.5 SP1) and sticking to full version numbers for Silverlight. It makes things easier to explain to customers. Also, the amount of new features in Silverlight 4 beta fully qualify it for a full version number
Laurent
How many frames/sec get dropped in 4.0 video playback? Cuz in 3.0 it’s usually ~15-20.
M$ is single-handedly trying to destroy Netflix one streamed movie at a time.
I’ve been streaming Netflix movies full screen on my PCs at home and work as well as on a XBOX /65″ HDTV and they all look and sound excellent. No dropped frames as far as I can see. I think Netflix made a great choice in Silverlight. I for one am very impressed with the quality of the videos. My wife and kids can’t tell if we are streaming a movie or watching a DVD. When they can’t tell a difference, you have a winner.
my experience with netflix on pc and xbox has been great. love the fact that it increase or decrease the quality level of the video depending on your connection speed so that you don’t get that choppy viewing experience..
Ugh… I can see the astroturfers are out in full force. I don’t know why I even bother commenting. If M$ put half the money into product development that they put into paying trolls in forums, they’d actually have half-way decent products.
Wait… wait… lemme guess… you guys also installed Vista and it just worked great for you. ZOMG!!!
These days “Microsoft” in a headline equals instant troll magnet. The sign of an imploding star.
I think it’s funny that Microsoft released IE8 saying that there was no need for faster JavaScript performance … and then they’re rolling out release after release of Silverlight talking about how much faster it is.
Silverlight is just Microsoft’s latest attempt to control the web. They’ll develop it rapidly till they’re no longer afraid of losing control. Then they’ll let it stagnate for years and leave all the people who developed for it out in the cold. Just like they did with IE6.
No thanks Microsoft.
“Microsoft released IE8 saying that there was no need for faster JavaScript performance”
Did they say that? I’d be surprised if they did. Got a link?
“Microsoft released IE8 saying that there was no need for faster JavaScript performance”
If this actually was said, they’ve recanted. A good part of the keynote yesterday covered IE9 and performance improvements made around the Javascript engine. The development teams are very much parallel and Silverlight isn’t made to replace Javascript by any means.
Why on earth would anyone develop using Silverlight – it won’t run on Linux. So you’re basically giving up on most of the new interesting smartphones, the next generation of netbooks/smartbooks, etc. etc.
If they made it cross-platform, it would be worth considering, maybe.
it does run on Linux.
In fact, Intel is specifically porting Silverlight to Linux for use on Cell. Phones…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/24/silverlight_to_linux/
(john above is probably referring to Moonlight which is a way to run Silverlight apps as Linux desktop apps)
This isn’t Gate’s Microsoft anymore. Ballmer’s MS means that SL will/does run on all OSes and browsers.
Why on earth would anybody care about Linux!!!
because many people use it(2-3%? i forget.)
2-3% is “many”? 2-3% justifies people choosing not to develop on Silverlight because it doesn’t support Linux?
Wake up!!
Putting aside the fact that it *does* run on Linux…. why would the fact that it does not run on Linux stop people from developing in it?
That’s analogous to Ford saying “there are 0.5% of the world’s roads that are not suitable for driving cars on so we’re not going to bother making any cars”.
Way too many MSFT haters on this board. SL4 is in BETA and has some crazy functionality.
You now have the ability to embed HTML inside Silverlight. This means all your silverlight apps can host content like YouTube, Hulu or anything that has HTML!
So if MSFT keeps up with the pace, people complain, if it doesn’t people still complain.
And for someone here who commented that MSFT is still playing catch with Flash…. grow up dude.
We have personally used SL2 and SL3 and our customers love it. These are the same customers that used your glorified, chunky flash apps.
I understand you may have issues with MSFT as a company, but don’t ruin it by criticizing them on stuff that actually is shiznit!
What the hell!!
Silverlight 4 has so many killer features, and you put the smallest feature in the title because it has the shiny google name in it.
Shame on you for biased reporting.
agreed, can someone with real knowledge and reporting skills rewrite this article?
+1000
If you have not realised it already, Microsoft has caused so many people so much pain over the years that, even tho, technically it is and is getting better then Flash will ever be. Flash NOT being Microsft and having a technology that works means it wins.
Microsoft is know to screw people over for its own interest. The mindshare reflects this, so even tho Silverlight is AMAZING, the traction it is getting is VERY small. Amazingly small considering how good it is.
But in the end, does it matter?
Probably not.
Flash/Silverlight, (I’m sorry, any idiot that thinks HTML5 and company will compete. PLEASE grow a brain. Please don’t open your mouth as you have no idea what you are talking about) Anyway, flash,silverlight, at the end of they day they can both make pritty user experiences. Does the user care. . . No.
Life goes on.
James
how has microsoft screwed you over? must be pretty bad..
“Does the user care. . . No.”
Damn straight dude.
TC why don’t you post that Seesmic is switching from AIR to Silverlight? I mean Loic an MA are buds right?
agreed, can someone with real knowledge and reporting skills rewrite this article?