Silverlight 5 – 5 Quick Things

Silverlight 5 is on the way.  Today (December 2, 2010) we’ve seen a brief preview, and I’d like to give a short overview of the important points.  I’m giving you the short story, and if you want a complete feature list see here. 3d You can now write 3d hardware accelerated applications in Silverlight.  This [...]

Silverlight 5 is on the way.  Today (December 2, 2010) we’ve seen a brief preview, and I’d like to give a short overview of the important points.  I’m giving you the short story, and if you want a complete feature list see here.

3d

You can now write 3d hardware accelerated applications in Silverlight.  This includes hardware accelerated shaders.  Are in-browser 3d shooters finally coming?  We’ll see

Media

Hardware accelerated video decoding.  Watching videos now uses less CPU power and more GPU power.

WPF parity

WPF people are great, but they’re always complaining about missing features:)    Silverlight 5 is now closer to WPF than any previous version (including custom markup extensions and Ancestor Relative Source).

Text/Printing

People who really care about fonts aren’t crazy about Silverlight 4 font rendering.  Silverlight 5 adds support for clearer fonts and other features (full OpenType font support, etc.).

Timeline

Silverlight 5 will be available in beta in early 2011.  It will be released in late 2011.