Oct 11
14
The Silverlight RC released in the first week of September, but unfortunately it does not have the ‘Go Live’ license. So, we will have to wait for the final release, which will get on board by the end of 2011.
At the MIX11 conference, the availability of Silverlight 5 Beta was announced by Scott Guthrie. In fact it is almost exactly a year ago when Silverlight 4 was released, so by now the ASP.NET developers can expect the newer version of the tool.
As in most of the cases with Silverlight beta releases in past, this is a developer release. Thus, this is a preview for software developers to understand the new features provided. There is no “end-user” runtime available for the release nor a “go-live” license for you to develop applications into production. So, you can play around this version, get used to it and then the developer can use this knowledge to score great when the final version comes out, expected in the end of 2011. It extends existing Silverlight 4 features and multitargeting capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 to also create applications for Silverlight 5 Beta using C# or Visual Basic.
Post MIX 2011 conference, they will release more functionality on the beta site in phases. Below is what the ASP.NET developers can expect to see over time:
• Faster page loads and performance all around (as compared to Silverlight 4)
• Better website internal search feature
• Simplified look and feel that will also be used across other developer sites in the months to come
• Simple and yet practical “Getting Started” resources and steps for new users
• Scalable and more usable information architecture in the “Learn” or “Help” section
• Richer Community info for social presence (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Events, News)
• Experience Level tags on all Learn content (Beginner, Novice, Intermediate, Professional) so that you can understand how technical the content is before you start reading it
• Richer meta data for all Learn content (author bios, related content, view counts and more) so that it will be faster and easier for you to find the content you need
• Integrated MSDN Code Gallery so that you can find and share samples with people from all over the world
• A content publishing architecture that allows us to more easily publish content at regular intervals
• Mark content items you’ve “completed” so that you can keep track of what you have read
• Mark content items as favorites – it will make the things easier to find the favorite articles
• Magazine and newspaper-style layout is difficult to achieve if the underlying platform does not include some mechanism for linking blocks of text and allowing that text to flow between the blocks. Silverlight 5 now includes the RichTextBoxOverflow element which, when wired to another RichTextBoxOverflow or to a RichTextBox, enable text to flow in columns or free-form layout
• ASP.NET developers can make more usage of implicit data templates in Silverlight 5 beta. They are a great way to automatically format different types of data (objects) in the presentation layer.
Concluding, this RC release is a developer-only release (there is no go-live license), designed to get you read for the final release later this year. Use this release to update your SL5 beta code to work with the namespace and reference changes, and to use the new features.
Thus, this isn’t the final release, so please go out and test it.
