Silverlight 4 Beta Announced!

Url: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/wha…

As noted in Scott Guthrie’s keynote early, Silverlight 4 is now in beta.  But what does that mean to you? Silverlight 4 Beta does not have a go-live license, so if you’re building something to be released soon, I would stick with Silverlight 3. In contrast if you’re working on a longer term project, especially a line-of business application, you’d be crazy to not look at Silverlight 4. Here are some of the major changes in this release:

General

• Printing Support
• Implicit Styling
• WebCam/Microphone Support
• RichTextArea Control
• Right-Mouse Button Events
• Drag-n-Drop/Clipboard Access
• UDP/Multicast Support in Networking

Out of the Browser Improvements

• Elevated Trust
• WebBrowser Control
• Controlling the Window
• Notification Windows (e.g. Outlook popup’s)
• COM Integration

Data Binding Improvements

• Binding to DependencyObjects (used to be FrameworkElement)
• StringFormat Markup Extension
• TargetNullValue Markup Extension
• FallbackValue Markup Extension
• Support for IDataErrorInfo and new INotifyDataErrorInfo for reporting validation errors.
• Binding to String Indexers
• GroupDescription support on CollectionViewSource for simplified grouping.

That’s a splendid list of improvements.  I will be writing blog entries about some of my favorites this week.  So keep an eye out for some examples!