Silverlight provides a rich application development
environment that enables you to build great web delivered applications.
Silverlight 5 delivers significant improvements for
application development including:
Databinding and MVVM: Silverlight 5 delivers significant
data-binding improvements that improve developer productivity and provide
better Silverlight/WPF feature convergence. Developers can now debug
data-binding expressions, set breakpoints on bindings, and more easily
determine errors. Implicit DataTemplates now allow templates to be
created across an application to support a particular type by default.
Ancestor RelativeSource bindings makes it easier for a DataTemplate to bind to
a property on a container control. Binding in style setters allows bindings to
be used within styles to reference other properties. And a new
DataContextChanged event is being introduced to make handling changes easier.
Markup extensions are also now support and allow code to be run at XAML parse
time for both properties and event handlers, enabling cutting-edge MVVM
support.
WCF and RIA Services: Silverlight 5 now includes WS-Trust
support. WCF RIA Services improvements include complex type support,
better MVVM support, and improved customization of code generation.
Silverlight 5’s networking stack also now supports low-latency network
scenarios that enable more responsive application scenarios.
Text and Printing: Silverlight 5 delivers improved text
clarity that enables crisper and cleaner text rendering, multi-column text flow
and linked text containers, character and leading support, and full OpenType
font support. Silverlight 5 also includes a new Postscript Vector
Printing API that provides programmatic control over what you print, and
enables printing richer reports and documents. Pivot functionality –
which enables developers to build amazing information visualization experiences
– will also be provided built-into the Silverlight 5 SDK.
Graphics: Silverlight 5 includes immediate mode graphics
support that enables developers to take full advantage of the GPU (graphics
processing unit) and enables accelerated 3-D graphics support. This new
support facilitates much richer data visualization scenarios (make sure to watch
the keynote to see some really eye-popping ones).
Out of Browser: Silverlight 5 builds on the out-of-browser
capabilities we introduced with Silverlight 5. Out of browser
applications can now create and manage child windows. Trusted out of
browser applications can now also use P/Invoke capabilities to call unmanaged
libraries and Win32 APIs. Enhanced group policy support enables
enterprises to both lock down and open up security sandbox capabilities of
Silverlight 5 applications.
Testing Tools: We are adding automated UI testing support
for Silverlight applications with Visual Studio 2010. This makes it easy
to test Silverlight applications, and automate the functionality of them.
Performance: Silverlight 5 support faster application
startup, and provides 64-bit browser support. Silverlight 5 also
integrates with the new Hardware Acceleration capabilities of IE9, and enables
hardware acceleration in windowsless mode.
