Silverlight 3: Somebody stop me

by Gary Illyes

Seemingly Microsoft presents similarities to the well known green-face character from “The Mask” movie; it just doesn’t shout “Somebody stop me”. Silverlight 2 is alive only for about 6 months, but Microsoft already announced the availability of Silverlight 3 beta. And is awesome.

Las Vegas — Silverlight 3 empowers Web developers and designers to build the best experiences for their customers through the creation of cutting-edge Web applications. Silverlight 3 helps rich Internet application (RIA) developers work faster with new graphics, animation and 3-D features, and more than 60 controls. Silverlight 3 also ushers in a new generation of high-quality and high-definition video experiences with true high-definition video in full-screen mode, with stutter-free live and on-demand video. Silverlight 3 also gives users more video format choices than ever before, including H.264, along with enhancements such as deep linking, to improve navigation in Silverlight content and automate search engine optimization (SEO) tasks. Finally, Silverlight 3 enables developers to create lightweight Web application experiences that can exist outside the browser. This enables Web sites to deliver more persistent relationships with their customers.

In the same time it was also announced Expression Blend 3 Preview, designed to dramatically improve designer and developer workflow and productivity. In the MIX09 keynote address, Microsoft demonstrated SketchFlow, a new capability that allows designers to quickly prototype the flow and composition of applications. Now, for the first time, designers can easily receive annotated feedback on prototypes from stakeholders and rapidly iterate on a project from concept to completion. In addition, Expression Blend directly supports the import of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files (including layers and paths), integration of live preview sample data, and a comprehensive set of rich behaviors.

“In the short time since we launched Silverlight and Expression Blend, Microsoft has rapidly introduced new features and functionality that enable customers to deliver outstanding Web sites,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft. “We are working closely with the community to deliver software that helps businesses provide customer experiences on the Web that go beyond ‘good enough’ and drive real business results.”

Silverlight has made significant progress since it was launched at MIX07. Hundreds of thousands of developers and designers are using Silverlight, and leading organizations such as AOL LLC, eBay Inc., BSkyB Ltd., Netflix Inc., CBS Sports Online, the European Commission, CareerBuilder.com, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Yahoo! Japan are building their next-generation rich applications and media experiences using Silverlight.

“Netflix chose Silverlight because it makes a faster and more agile development environment possible, allowing Netflix to quickly deliver a superior instant watching experience to our subscribers,” said Steve Swasey, vice president of corporate communications at Netflix. “When Netflix deployed Silverlight last fall, Netflix members realized a richer experience of access and quality to instantly watch movies and TV episodes from Netflix on their PCs and, for the first time, were able to instantly watch the same content on their Intel-based Macintosh computers.”

At Microsoft, more than 200 products and Web sites are now using Silverlight, including Microsoft.com, MSN, Live Search, Windows Live, Microsoft Office Online, Virtual Earth and the live preview release of the Silverlight-based WorldWide Telescope application.