RSSMicrosoft pulls the curtain on Silverlight 3
By Tim Conneally | Published March 18, 2009, 1:43 PM
Developers are getting a lot of love this week. Access to iPhone 3.0 has come to iPhone devs, and Nvidia PhysX has come to PlayStation 3 game makers. Now, Microsoft has unveiled developer beta 3 of its Silverlight runtime.
Offering a host of audio and video improvements, Silverlight now supports 720p full screen HD playback and MPEG 4-based H.264/AAC audio. 3D graphics rendering and animation has been improved, and more than 60 controls with source code have been added.
A major improvement in Silverlight 3 is the ability for apps to run outside of the browser without the need to download any additional plug-ins or runtimes. This will allow the user to pull a Silverlight app out of the browser, install it on his desktop, and run it in the future without re-launching a browser.
Visual Studio developers looking to install Silverlight 3 beta tools are warned that once the beta is installed, it cannot be used to develop Silverlight 2 apps. This is because Visual Studio 2008 SP1 does not support multi-targeting for Silverlight applications.
Microsoft is in a permanent hyped-up beta ground-loop these days. feature, beta, feature, beta, feature, beta (ad nausea).... I think they are all on Coke (both kinds) or some quasi-legal derivative. Less future (beta) and more here now please.
We all love new features - but not at the cost of maturity, stability and REAL cross-platform (Linux anyone) compatibility (which Flash has).
P.S. The Canada joke was super lame - half of those guys probably don't even know where Canada (or most countries) even are - mainly because we've had our beloved USA shoved up our butt so far that we can't even see straight %(
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|"mainly because we've had our beloved USA shoved up our butt so far that we can't even see straight"
Are you high? There hasn't been any patriotism in this country (at least not that the media would ever focus on) since the media decided that 9/11 didn't happen. Do you even watch the news?
If you want to retain your delusion, I would advise against it. According to most of them, we are the root of all Evil™. (Not that we aren't headed there currently by laying the ground-work for the most sensational dependent-class, entitlement-based national nightmare the world has *ever* seen...)
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|oh please. you want to spout your right wing crap why don't you go hang out in a young republicans meeting, not here.
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|*laughing*
"right wing crap"
That's what we're calling the truth nowadays?
But you're right, of course. This isn't a political forum. I do try to keep it under wraps here, but of course, posts such as the OPs tend to light the fire, so to speak... ;)
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|"oh please. you want to spout your right wing crap why don't you go hang out in a young republicans meeting, not here."
Nothing intelligent to say so your resort to childish name calling. Typical.
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|Silverlight has a great programming model. It is a true RIA platform from the ground up. Let's just hope the moonlight folks keep up so the Linux crowd is pacified...
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|there are so many things silverlight can do i can't even name them all, one of the things i liked are web apps built on silverlight, that basically required zero install of said apps and pinning to your taskbar and syncing ... that and offline mode
i think silverlight just gave adobe flash and air a run for their money with a single app... and lets hope that its a little less resource intensive than adobes air platform and its clients lol
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|Silverlight 2 is less resource intensive than Flash -- don't know about SL3. Let's hope we see some apps move from Java to SL.
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|oh really? who's your source for that bold claim? i can tell you (from first hand experience) that in terms of handling video and animation at the same time, Sl can't do it with anything less than a core 2 duo. further Sl 2 doesn't even have hardware acceleration so i can't even imagine how you could make the claim that it's less intensive when it's not trying to offload some of the work.
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