InfoQ Homepage Silverlight Content on InfoQ
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MIX 2011 Keynote 2 Highlights
Round 2 at MIX heavily focused on the next version of Windows Phone. Kinect for Windows was also showcased and Silverlight 5 was briefly mentioned.
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MIX 2011: What to Expect
HTML 5, Silverlight 5, and a surprise announcement about Windows Phone 7 look to be on the table at MIX 2011. We are also going to see information on Surface 2, ECMAScript 5, the next version of Web Forms, and the Microsoft Media Platform.
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Microsoft on Plug-ins vs HTML5
In an announcement signed Walid, Scott and Soma, Microsoft has clarified its position on the role of plug-ins vs. web standards such as HTML5. With a bit of humility, they are taking a fairly balanced stance by acknowledging the increasingly important cross-platform capabilities of HTML5 while still promoting the advanced capabilities of plug-in development.
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Moonlight Playbacks Video Directly on GPU
Moonlight has been enhanced to support GPU-accelerated video playback. Silverlight 5 will do the same, but with extra features.
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LightSwitch Beta 2 Adds Support for Windows Azure
Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 allows publishing an application to Windows Azure, has improved runtime and design-time performance, better runtime UI, and allows any authenticated Windows user to run the application.
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Native Extensions further to blur the boundary between Silverlight and WPF
Designed for use with “out-of-browser” instances of Silverlight, it uses COM automation to expose features specific to Windows 7. The major feature areas include Message Interception, Sensor API, H.264 video encoding, taskbar extensions, Speech API, and access to portable devices.
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A Case for WinForms
When DevExpress released their roadmap for 2011, WinForms barely got a mention. As a ten year old technology that is basically abandoned by its creator this isn’t too surprising. But what it interesting the amount of negative feedback that generated. A lot of DevExpress’s customers just don’t see WPF or Silverlight as a viable replacement for their major applications.
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Silverlight 4 Updates Improves Network Latency, Memory Usage
Earlier this week Microsoft released an update to Silverlight that addresses several key issues in the platform. The most notable of these is a 90% improvement in network latency and a solution to the memory leaks caused by inline data templates.
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Moonlight 4.0 Preview 1 Has Been Released
Moonlight 4.0 Preview 1 includes all the Silverlight 3.0 API and a part of Silverlight 4.0 API. New features include: Out-of-Browser, GPU-accelerated graphics, 3D transformation, shaders, V4L2 video capture, H.264 and AAC, and better smooth streaming.
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Accessing Windows 7 Features from Silverlight
Microsoft has released a library exposing Windows 7 features – sensors, speech, devices, taskbar, touch – to Silverlight Out-of-Browser applications running with elevated trust.
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Silverlight 5 Timeline And Lots of Questions
Yesterday Microsoft announced the timeline for Silverlight 5 in 2011 at the Silverlight FireStarter event. Silverlight 5 will be in beta the first half of 2011 and ship early in the second half of 2011. Developers quickly began posting impressions and many questions.
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Moonlight Leaps Ahead of Silverlight with Hardware Accelerated Pixel Shaders
Recently David Reveman added significant amounts of hardware rendering to Novel’s Moonlight. This puts it in the lead over Silverlight, offers only a limited amount of hardware rendering support.
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Silverlight Is for the Client, HTML5 for the Web
After saying about Silverlight that “our strategy has shifted” at PDC 2010, Bob Muglia attempted to clarify what he meant. Steve Ballmer and Tim Heuer also commented on Silverlight, trying to reassure the community on Microsoft’s commitment to Silverlight, but also pointing to the fact that HTML5 is the solution for cross-platform development, leaving Silverlight to the client and Windows Phone.
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A DSL for Multi-touch Gestures
As part of the TouchToolkit, Frank Maurer and Shahedul Huq Khandkar have created a DSL for multi-touch gestures. The language is in a declarative style with two sections. The first section, labeled “validate”, contains the rules used to determine if a specific gesture is being performed. The second section contains the return values for the gesture.
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.NET’s Platform Divergence Problem
For many years the platform dependency issues in .NET we very easy to understand. Almost everything people used was marked as either compatible with .NET Compact Edition or with the full edition. Aside from .NET Micro, which hardly anyone used, there wasn’t much else to worry about. But now that there is over a dozen active frameworks to choose from, the situation has grown quite complex.