Even a chimp can write code

Thursday, June 05, 2008

Beta 2 of Silverlight 2 has just shipped

The second beta of Silverlight 2 has just been released. The team has been cranking away and there are some new features and lots of bug fixes to show. A big thanks to all who provided vital feedback on our previous pre-releases!

  • Animation
    1. Support for animating custom data points
    2. Object Animation support (animating structs)
  • Deep Zoom
    1. New XML-based file format
    2. MultiScaleTileSource to wire up your own images and get the Deep Zoom experience
    3. Better notifications when sub-images enter the view
  • Controls
    1. Customize the look and feel of controls using Visual State Manager. Interactive control templates were never so easy.
    2. Some base controls are now part of the core platform, rather than packaged into apps. Say hello to smaller app sizes.
    3. Calendar now supports multi-selection and blackout dates
    4. New TabControl
    5. Control properties changes (Background, Tooltip, FontFamily, FontSize…)
    6. DataGrid improvements: auto size, reorder, sort, performance and more
  • TextBox
    1. IME Level 3 input support
    2. Text wrapping and multiline selection highlighting in textbox
    3. Scrolling and clipboard support
    4. Document level navigation keys
  • Improvements in error handling, reporting
  • Parser and Property system
    1. DependencyProperty.Register/RegisterAttached now supports PropertyMetadata
    2. New DependencyObject.ClearValue
    3. Visual tree helper
  • Data-binding
    1. Per binding level validation
    2. Support for element syntax for binding markup extensions
    3. Binding to attached properties
    4. ItemsControl extensibility (OnItemsChanged method)
    5. Fallback in value conversion (Binding.UnsetValue)
  • Input
    1. Support for limited keyboard input in Full Screen mode (arrow, tab, enter, home, end, pageup/pagedown, space). I've seen more than a few requests for this on the forums.
    2. Managed APIs for Inking and stylus input
  • Networking and Data
    1. Cross Domain support in Sockets
    2. Cross Domain security enhancements
    3. HttpWebRequest and WebClient callable from background threads
    4. Upload support in WebClient
    5. Isolated Storage: default size increased to 1MB and new ability to change quota with user consent. Also a new management UI.
    6. Duplex communications ("push" from server to Silverlight client with no need to "poll" for data)
    7. LINQ -to- JSON serialization
    8. Significantly improved SOAP interop
    9. "Add New Item" template in Visual Studio for "Silverlight-enabled WCF Service"
    10. ADO.NET Data Services support
  • UIAutomation and Accessibility support in the platform
  • Media
    1. Platform support for Adaptive Streaming (also referred to by people as multi bitrate), the ability for Silverlight to switch between media depending on network and CPU conditions
    2. Content protection with PlayReady DRM and Windows DRM
    3. Basic server-side playlist (SSPL) support
  • Localization
    1. Changes to localized application model. You now create one xap per locale, instead of one monolithic multilingual app
    2. Expanded localization languages of runtime and SDK
    3. Japanese SDK Installer and documentation (July 10)
  • Several changes to make API and behavior more compatible with WPF
  • Tools
    1. Beta 1 projects will be automatically ported to Beta 2
    2. Remote debugging for VB on the Mac
  • CLR
    1. A new developer-oriented runtime package with debugging binaries, localized strings, docs etc.
    2. Support for OS fallback logic for resources
    3. CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture isolation to AppDomain level
  • DLR
    1. Performance improvements
    2. Various new DLR and IronPython 2.0 Beta 2 language features
    3. Various new IronRuby features

We're not quite done for Silverlight 2, but are getting really close. There's some ongoing work to get more controls delivered (Scott has said the expectation was to ship over 100 controls) at and beyond RTW. I know people have asked for ComboBox and PasswordBox. We'll also have per-frame callback support (CompositionTarget.Rendering event) to light up those physics animation scenarios you're dreaming of, and further accessibility work on controls, improvements to PNG support in imaging, among other things. Needless to say, the focus from here on will be to stabilize and ship a solid product.

I hope you like what we've cooked. Please keep that feedback coming. Without you this would not be possible and be quite meaningless.

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Posted by Ashish Shetty | Permalink

2 Comments:

  • @"Customize the look and feel of controls using Visual State Manager. Interactive control templates were never so easy."

    The assumption at Microsoft seems to continue to be that developers actually want to have to replace whole ControlTemplate's in order to achieve subtle style changes. In particular, changing where content gets positioned within the BoxModel has basically zero effect on the ControlTemplate's control logic and pretty much exists entirely outside the domain of the control. In fact, the control template should have no knowledge of its location within the box model.

    In a nutshell, ControlTemplates break the Open-Closed Principle of Object-Oriented Analysis. This is probably the most condemning fact about Silverlight and WPF that I can think of, compared to the traditional HTML/CSS box model architecture.

    By Blogger John Zabroski, at July 17, 2008 at 8:46 AM  

  • Also, come to think of it, this also has a significant impact on Microsoft's ability to update the default Look&Feel of its control set, especially during Beta release.

    For instance, many of the ControlTemplates are going through design iterations for Silverlight, and are subject to change.

    By Blogger John Zabroski, at July 17, 2008 at 8:53 AM  

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